Greenwood: A Novel
Regular price $22.00Meet Me at the Lake
Regular price $24.95
In this breathtaking new novel from the #1 bestselling author of Every Summer After, a random connection sends two strangers on a daylong adventure where they make a promise one keeps and the other breaks, with life-changing effects.
Fern Brookbanks has wasted far too much of her adult life thinking about Will Baxter. She spent just twenty-four hours in her early twenties with the aggravatingly attractive, idealistic artist, a chance encounter that spiraled into a daylong adventure in Toronto. The timing was wrong, but their connection was undeniable: they shared every secret, every dream, and made a pact to meet one year later. Fern showed up. Will didn’t.
At thirty-two, Fern’s life doesn’t look at all how she once imagined it would. Instead of living in the city, Fern’s back home, running her mother’s Muskoka lakeside resort—something she vowed never to do. The place is in disarray, her ex-boyfriend’s the manager, and Fern doesn’t know where to begin.
She needs a plan—a lifeline. To her surprise, it comes in the form of Will, who arrives nine years too late, with a suitcase in tow and an offer to help on his lips. Will may be the only person who understands what Fern’s going through. But how could she possibly trust this expensive-suit wearing mirage who seems nothing like the young man she met all those years ago. Will is hiding something, and Fern’s not sure she wants to know what it is.
But ten years ago, Will Baxter rescued Fern. Can she do the same for him?
One of:
TODAY’s “36 new books we can’t wait to read in 2023”
Buzzfeed’s “33 Romance Books to Look Out for in 2023”
CBC’s “30 highly anticipated Canadian titles coming this year”
SheReads' “Most Anticipated Romances of 2023”
“A breathtaking tale of star-crossed lovers that gripped me from page one. Meet Me At The Lake is nostalgia, summer breeze, second chances and pure heart.”
—Elena Armas, New York Times bestselling author of The Spanish Love Deception
“A perfect summery blend of sexy romance and second chances, Meet Me at the Lake is a poignant waltz between evergreen pines and poplars and heartache. I fell in love with Will and Fern over and over and over again.”
—Ashley Poston, New York Times bestselling author of The Dead Romantics
“A completely addicting love story about the ways we find who we are and what we want amidst changing dreams and chances missed. Carley Fortune gives us another perfect summer read brimming with heart, a book to devour in a day, swept away in the nostalgia of young, sexy love. Every Summer After fans, this will not disappoint!”
—Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push
“Meet Me at the Lake is a tender, sweet story that captures the joy and sorrow of growing up. Carley Fortune's latest is a love letter to moms and daughters, as well as second chances.”
—Elissa Sussman, bestselling author of Funny You Should Ask
"Meet Me at The Lake is a beautiful, heart-tugging, love story about secrets, lies, missed connections and second chances. Set against the idyllic backdrop of a family hotel on a rural lake, this novel brims with the warmth of summertime and the feeling of home. An exquisite, emotional read.”
—Jill Santopolo, New York Times bestselling author of Stars in an Italian Sky
“Carley Fortune is the master of the love story, tapping into our most primal needs—to be valued and seen for who we really are. Meet Me At The Lake is story telling perfection.”
—Annabel Monaghan, author of Nora Goes Off Script
“Readers experience Carley Fortune's writing with all five senses. In Meet Me At The Lake, that means you'll taste Peter's sourdough. You'll hear the sound of the trees swaying by the lake. You'll smell the gin and the watered-down tonic. You'll see Fern waiting down by the docks. And you'll feel every pulse of electricity from Will. This is a beautiful story of letting go of expectations, growing into who you're meant to become, and letting love in when you don't feel you deserve it. The perfect summer read and an excellent follow-up to Every Summer After. Carley's talent sings on every page.”
—Iman Hariri-Kia, author of A Hundred Other Girls
“THE quintessential book of summer. Nestled in the heart of Canada's cottage country, Fortune masterfully crafts yet another enthralling tale of love and second chances that will burrow itself deep into your soul long after the last page."
—Amy Lea, author of Exes and O’s
“Fortune (Every Summer After) shines in this beautiful tale of love, loss, and forgiveness. This searing story of hard-won second chances is not to be missed."
—Publishers Weekly
“This contemporary romance is an immersive second-chance love story that will transport readers with its dual evocation settings of stunning rural Ontario and thrilling Toronto."
—Library Journal
Normal Women
Regular price $24.00Five Little Indians
Regular price $22.99WINNER: Canada Reads 2022
WINNER: Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
WINNER: Amazon First Novel Awards
WINNER: Kobo Emerging Author Prize
Finalist: Scotiabank Giller Prize
Finalist: Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Prize
Finalist: BC & Yukon Book Prize
Shortlist: Indigenous Voices Awards
Finalist: Kobo Emerging Author Prize
National Bestseller; A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year; A CBC Best Book of the Year; An Apple Best Book of the Year; A Kobo Best Book of the Year; An Indigo Best Book of the Year
Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.
Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.
Fuelled by rage and furious with God, Clara finds her way into the dangerous, highly charged world of the American Indian Movement. Maisie internalizes her pain and continually places herself in dangerous situations. Famous for his daring escapes from the school, Kenny can’t stop running and moves restlessly from job to job—through fishing grounds, orchards and logging camps—trying to outrun his memories and his addiction. Lucy finds peace in motherhood and nurtures a secret compulsive disorder as she waits for Kenny to return to the life they once hoped to share together. After almost beating one of his tormentors to death, Howie serves time in prison, then tries once again to re-enter society and begin life anew.
With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.
Ghost Forest
Regular price $22.00 Sale price $16.00The Story of Us
Regular price $23.99 Sale price $18.00Like many Overseas Filipino Workers, Mary Grace Concepcion has lived a life of sacrifices. First, she left her husband, Ale, to be a caregiver in Hong Kong. Now, she has travelled even farther, to Canada, in the hopes of one day sponsoring Ale and having children of their own.
But when she arrives in Toronto, she must navigate a series of bewildering and careless employers and unruly children. Mary Grace seeks new employment as a Personal Support Worker and begins caring for Liz, an elderly patient suffering from Alzheimer's disease, whose health is as fragile as her rundown bungalow beside the Rouge River in Scarborough. While Mary Grace's time with her charge challenges her conservative beliefs, she soon becomes Liz's biggest ally, and the friendship that grows between them will turn out to be just as legendary as Liz's past.
Beautifully narrated by the all-seeing eye of Mary Grace's newborn baby, The Story of Us is a novel about sisterhood, about blood and chosen family, and about how belonging can be found where we least expect it.
The Future
Regular price $24.95
Shortlisted for Canada Reads 2024 • One of Tor.com‘s Can’t Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of 20 Books You Heard about on CBC Last Week • One of Kirkus Reviews‘ Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023
In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.
In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.
Download The Future Reading Guide here!
Praise for The Future
“What makes The Future hopeful is its imagining of new, organic, co-operative (but not egalitarian) communities … savage but caring networks: small, local, and while living close to the edge still managing to get by. It may not be progress, but it is adapting to a vision of the future that hits pretty close to home.”
—Alex Good, Toronto Star
“This atmospheric novel elevates disparate voices, drawing a complex picture of community-focused life beyond the family unit.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The Future is a rewarding read, mostly because of the hope it instills. There is some violence, of course, but Leroux’s vision of the future is one where people go out of their way to help each other to survive.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Leroux brings believability, poetry, and hopefulness to the dystopian narrative of Fort Détroit by steering clear of the many pitfalls of end-times novel … This permits the novel to imagine infinite small beginnings within the ending, and to show how destruction is balanced by the ever-present promise of creation.”
—Bronwyn Averett, Montreal Review of Books
“At the heart of Catherine Leroux’s extraordinary novel are the rising and vanishing lifeworlds nurtured by the Rouge River. The children of the Rouge are hunters and prey, remorseless, capable, indelible—‘wildings’ who are simultaneously custodians and seeds of the future. This ferocious, provocative dystopia is a dance of knives, and a deeply moving exploration of our decaying, adapting, ever-changing world.”
—Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“Unlike some dystopian books, The Future is suffused with a sense of optimism … Though their neighbourhood is decaying and the economy is crumbling, the characters reach beyond the every-person-for-themselves trope by celebrating community, the power of cooperation, and hope.”
—The Miramichi Reader
“An inherently fascinating, original, and carefully crafted novel that raises ‘alternate history’ science fiction to a high level of literary eloquence, The Future is unique, entertaining, and highly recommended.”
—Midwest Review of Books
“This is a wonderful and complicated story about unique and intertwined characters. Leroux includes perfectly subtle allusions, and her writing is absolutely beautiful.”
—McGill Daily
“At the height of her art, in a profound and teeming language marked by dialogues written in an invented patois, Catherine Leroux also gives us a glimpse of a world where nature flourishes against all odds, where legends are brought to life and where magical realism reigns.”
—La Presse, Montreal
“The novel answers concrete questions: what happens after the end of the world? … Nothing can erase the survivors’ traumatic memories but their hope persists and their present is full of intergenerational support and characters who create new ways of living among the ruins … Catherine Leroux delivers a dazzling and original novel, above all a testament to the humanity and resilience of communities in the margins.”
—Etudes, Montreal
“This poignant utopia captures how cities have souls, how they live and die, and how they sometimes miraculously rise from the dead. Far from the usual depressing post-apocalyptic novel, The Future is an exhilarating story in which Gloria, who relies on her daily horoscope to guide her, creates a future for her community that is finally able to find wonder after suffering loss.”
—Livres Hebdo, Montreal
“Despite the suffering and horror, despite the precariousness, the novel is full of hope, light and goodness, and offers a vision of intergenerational healing.”
—Le Devoir, Montreal
Everyone Here is Lying
Regular price $26.00____________________________
Shari Lapena is the internationally bestselling author of the thrillers The Couple Next Door, A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, Someone We Know, The End of Her, and Not a Happy Family, which have all been New York Times and The Sunday Times (London) bestsellers. Her books have been sold in thirty-eight territories around the world. She lives in Toronto
What Wild Women Do
Regular price $26.95Good Material
Regular price $26.00The Whispers
Regular price $24.95
On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbourhood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.
Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney’s best friend, suspects something isn’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whitney’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone’s world unravel from her front porch.
Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent.
Women Talking
Regular price $22.00The Double Life of Benson Yu
Regular price $36.00WJB Book Club Pick for September 2023!
Use code BOOKCLUB for 20% off this title, and meet us to discuss it on Thursday September 29th at 6:00pm!
“A nuanced, complex, and highly original novel.” —Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown
A fresh, unique work of metafiction that follows a graphic novelist who loses control of his own narrative when he attempts to write the story of his fraught upbringing in 1980s Chinatown.
In a Chinatown housing project lives twelve-year-old Benny, his ailing grandmother, and his strange neighbor Constantine, a man who believes he’s a reincarnated medieval samurai. When his grandmother is hospitalized, Benny manages to survive on his own until a social worker comes snooping. With no other family, he is reluctantly taken in by Constantine and soon, an unlikely bond forms between the two.
At least, that’s what Yu, the narrator of the story, wants to write.
The creator of a bestselling comic book, Yu is struggling with continuing the poignant tale of Benny and can’t help but interject from the present day, slowly revealing a darker backstory. Can Yu confront the demons he’s spent his adult life avoiding or risk his own life...and Benny’s?
“Instructive as it is inspiring, The Double Life of Benson Yu is a phenomenal example of a writer taking real risks in order to reveal and reckon with deep-rooted, tormenting truths as a means of moving forward. Kevin Chong has crafted a novel that will get your heart pumping, mind jumping, and, best of all, fingers turning” (Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author).
Kevin Chong is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Rumpus, and more. He currently lives in Vancouver and is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.
In the Upper Country
Regular price $23.00Motherthing
Regular price $24.00________________
AINSLIE HOGARTH is the author of the YA novels The Lonely and The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated). She lives in Canada with her husband, kids, and little dog.
Gutter Child
Regular price $22.99
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Cityline Book Club Pick
“A deep, unflinching yet loving look at injustice and power.” —Chatelaine
“A powerful and unforgettable novel” (Quill and Quire, starred review) about a young woman who must find the courage to secure her freedom and determine her own future
Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. As part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government, Elimina Dubois is one of just one hundred babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity.
But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Sent to an academy with new rules and expectations, Elimina befriends children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever way they know how. But when her life takes yet another unexpected turn, Elimina will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longed for after all.
Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. As a modern heroine in an altered but all-too-recognizable reality, Elimina must find the strength within herself to forge her future in defiance of a system that tries to shape her destiny.
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JAEL RICHARDSON is the executive director of the Festival of Literary Diversity, a books columnist on CBC Radio’s q and an outspoken advocate on issues of diversity. She is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey, and the children’s book Because You Are. Jael Richardson received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Brampton, Ontario.
VenCo
Regular price $35.00