Fiction Books

"No-one does suburban paranoia like Shari Lapena--this slowly unfurling nightmare will have you biting your nails until the end."
--Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10

The new domestic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door, A Stranger in the House, and An Unwanted Guest, Shari Lapena

Maybe you don't know your neighbors as well as you thought you did . . .

"This is a very difficult letter to write. I hope you will not hate us too much. . . My son broke into your home recently while you were out."

In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses--and into the owners' computers as well--learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too.

Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point. Who killed her? Who knows more than they're telling? And how far will all these very nice people go to protect their own secrets?

In this neighborhood, it's not just the husbands and wives who play games. Here, everyone in the family has something to hide . . .

You never really know what people are capable of.

____________________________

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

Previously published as Dead Cold

A New York Times Bestseller

'Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache of the Quebec police isone of the most interesting detectives in crime fiction' The Times

Winter in Three Pines, and the sleepy village is carpeted in snow. It's a time of peace and goodwill - until a scream pierces the biting air. A spectator at the annual Boxing Day curling match has been fatally electrocuted. Despite the large crowd, there are no witnesses and - apparently - no clues.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache discovers a history of secrets and enemies in the dead woman's past. But he has enemies of his own, and as he is frozen out of decision-making in the Surete du Quebec, he has to decide who he can trust...

'A cracking storyteller, who can create fascinating characters, a twisty plot and wonderful surprise endings' Ann Cleeves

Louise Penny is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Gamache series, including Still Life, which won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2006. Recipient of virtually every existing award for crime fiction, Louise was also granted the Order of Canada in 2014 and received an honorary doctorate of literature from Carleton University and the Ordre Nationale du Québec in 2017. She lives in a small village south of Montreal.

An affecting glimpse into the ways millennials cope with mental health struggles

Clara's at a breaking point. She's got writer's block, her friends ask a lot without giving much, her psychologist is useless, and her demanding publishing job leaves little time for self care. She seeks solace in the community around her, yet, while her friends provide support and comfort, she is often left feeling empty, unable to express an underlying depression that leaves her immobilized and stifles any attempts at completing her poetry collection. In This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle paints an empathetic portrait of a young woman wrestling with psychological stress and the trauma following a sexual assault.

Malle displays frankness and a remarkable emotional intelligence as she explores depression, isolation, and self-harm in her expertly drawn novel. Her heroine battles an onslaught of painful emotions and while Clara can provide consolation to those around her, she finds it difficult to bestow the same understanding on herself. Only when she allows her community to guide her toward self-love does she find relief.

Filled with 21st century idioms and social media communication, This Is How I Disappear opens a window onto the lives of young people as they face a barrage of mental health hurdles. Scenes of sisterhood, fun nights out singing karaoke, and impromptu FaceTime therapy sessions show how this generation is coping, connecting, and healing together.

Mirion Malle is a French cartoonist and illustrator who lives in Montreal. She studied comics at the École Superieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels before pursuing a master's degree in sociology specializing in gender and feminist studies, via Université Paris Diderot and the Université du Québec á Montréal. Malle has published three books. The League of Super Feminists was her first book to be translated into English and was nominated for the 2020 Prix Jeunesse at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times 

“Mandel’s sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination. . . . Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives.” —Esquire  

From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, a “bold and exciting” (The Economist) and “transcendent” (Wall Street Journal) novel filled with “puncturing emotional truths” (Glamour)  

In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the west coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, Emily St. John Mandel’s dazzling story follows these engrossing characters across space and time as their lives ultimately intersect.

Sea of Tranquility is a breathtaking and wondrous examination of the ties that bind us together, by a master storyteller. 

Critical Praise

“Mandel is an easy read…No matter where or when we touch down we feel at home in worlds much like our own….Which may be the point she’s getting at: we’re all, and will always be, part of a larger human story. In the face of pandemic or other catastrophes, all roads lead to home, whether those roads connect to the far edge of the Western world or the Far Colonies of space.” — Toronto Star

“In Mandel’s stunning latest, people find themselves inhabiting different places and times, from early 20th-century Canada to a 23rd-century moon colony… The novel’s narratives crystallize flawlessly. Brilliantly combining imagery from science fiction and the current pandemic, Mandel grounds her rich metaphysical speculation in small, beautifully observed human moments. By turns playful, tragic, and tender, this should not be missed.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A complicated and mysterious puzzle concerning the nature of reality solved perfectly, all loose ends connected...Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world’ and who one day might live well beyond.”  — New York Times Magazine

“Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel’s previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction.”  — New Yorker

“‘Reality is things as they are,’ Wallace Stevens declared, and who could argue with that? Well, legions of philosophers and any number of novelists, among them Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as time…Transcendent.”  — Wall Street Journal

"Mandel delivers...with an impish blend of wit and dread. The paradoxes of Gaspery’s adventure will be familiar to anyone who’s studied Jean Baudrillard or seen “Back to the Future.” But Mandel has the stylistic elegance and emotional sympathy to make this more than merely an undergraduate bull session. Absent your own time portal to the 1990s, it’s a chance to... wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see." — Washington Post

"An emotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one another—and what we should be."  — Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

“I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I won’t dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming.” — Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here

"A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling—sci-fi with soul." — Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

"Bold and exciting...Sea of Tranquility is Ms Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet (which is saying something). Inventive and...mind-bending, thanks to her disrupted timelines and fully realised vision of lunar settlements and parallel universes...Her depiction of a future pandemic is recognisable and touching...An illuminating study of survival and, in the words of one character, 'what makes a world real.'" — The Economist

“Fusing sci-fi and great storytelling, this imaginative novel from the author of Station Eleven explores how technology might control our fate if we abandon compassion.” — People

"St. John Mandel’s tender and idiosyncratic novel will undeniably make its own mark on its readers’ imaginations." — The Guardian

"Mandel’s sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination...Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives." — Esquire

“Sea Of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters…Mandel is an important novelist of our moment, but doesn't settle for merely replicating our moment. She inhabits it even as she sees beyond it.”  — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

"There is both elegance and tenderness in Mandel’s narrative design...For her, science fiction allows us only enough escape from our context to let us regard it from a softening distance." — The Nation

“Lovely, life-affirming…The project of Sea of Tranquility is about finding meaning and beauty within a world that is constantly dying, about relishing a life that seems always on the cusp of awful and irrevocable change…. Mandel’s prose is shot through with moments of unexpected lyricism…that take you by surprise with their limpid sweetness… Nourishing and needed. The world is always ending, this book says, and there is always beauty to be found in it.” — Vox

"If there is one thing Emily St. John Mandel is going to do, it’s tell a story that’s so good that you’ll keep reading even though the plot includes pandemics and loss and the frightening future of the planet. St John Mandel’s swift storytelling and puncturing emotional truths will leave you wishing it was hundreds of pages longer. She remains an instant-buy writer." — Glamour

“‘When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?’ asks a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility… At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished.” — Elle

"With vivid and memorable characters, gorgeously imaginative settings and a plot that will have you gasping aloud, it ping-pongs from an eerie encounter in North America in 1912 to the anxiety of trying to escape a plague-ravaged Earth to moon colonies that feel at once just like home and far from it. This is a triumph of science fiction, so give it a try even if the genre usually leaves you cold."  — Good Housekeeping

"Survival, [Mandel] has suggested again and again, may depend more on one’s ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress one’s bunker is….Mandel almost seems to be looking straight at the reader…asking us, in effect, to look beyond the spectacle of apocalypse to the long sweep of history. The point isn’t the end, because there isn’t a definitive end, just a series of endings. The point is what the people left do next.”
— Oprah Daily

"It is the human story that Mandel excels at portraying...Her writing on nature echoes a brutal solitude, the unease that comes when one ascends a mountain, crosses an expanse of golden plains, or finds themselves floating in space." — Nylah Burton, Shondaland

“Readers of Mandel’s other novels will remember her talent for subtly interweaving disparate narratives, and Sea of Tranquility rises to that area of expertise….Mandel masterfully connects characters’ observations and senses within any given moment….Sea of Tranquility is…for anyone who wants to think about what the end of the world means, and how our lives matter in the face of it.” — Observer-Reporter (Pennsylvania)

"Reading about a pandemic when the real world is still recovering from one would have been heavy going, were it not for the unerring grace of Mandel's prose." — The Straits Times

“A very knowing novel…Powerful…Very enjoyable…A book brimming with a sense of wonder, a sense of humour, and a sense for the weirdness we’ve all been experienc­ing over the last couple of years.” — Locus

“Each character alone could probably carry a book, and so could the picture — not rosy, but hardly hopeless — that Mandel paints of a future Earth…Generous with flashes of wry humor…Mandel’s style is distinctly her own, and she excels at bringing brightness out of the dark. Readers will leave Sea of Tranquility like Station Eleven before it, feeling hope for humanity.”  — Gail Pennington, St. Louis Post Dispatch

"A full-on mind-blower. Inspired by real-world ills and eccentric philosophical theories, Mandel has crafted an enthralling narrative puzzle, plunging her relatable characters into a tale that spans five centuries." — Kevin Canfield, StarTribune

“This slim novel is written in a cool, elegant voice, like that of a singer who never wastes a note and who suggests strong emotion underneath her reserve.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Mandel's writing is incredibly fluid and gripping and never failed to keep me reading." — The Eastern Echo

“A time-travel puzzle…Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly…In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.” — BookPage

"Sea of Tranquility is [Mandel's] airship, offering readers a lifeline, and transporting them on a thrilling, wistful and memorable journey into the stars." — Jodé Millman, Booktrib

In ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other’s lives.

Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.

Praise for Shimmer

“Looking at Shimmer as a whole, one is struck by Pugsley’s mastery of the short-story form, his ability to distil entire lives’ worth of meaning into a few short pages. He’s not just a writer to watch: he’s a writer to savour.”—Robert Wiersema, Toronto Star

“His greatest gift as a writer is, I believe, his ability to carry dialogue … a brave departure from the highly-praised Aubrey McKee.”—Miramichi Reader

“Pugsley brings out the confusion of life well. No one is in control. Everyone has doubts about themselves and others. His ability to show the twists and turns of our constant, anxious questioning of ourselves makes each story revelatory in a different way. A truly impressive collection!”—Ottawa Review of Books

“[Pugsley’s] story proves that the digital mode of communication, while frequently castigated as impersonal and dehumanizing, can, in the right hands, carry with it strong emotional resonance.”—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

“Pugsley excels at putting life on the page, mainly because he uses a profusion of concrete details. He out-Dickens Dickens. And it works.”—Maple Tree Literary Supplement

“Alex Pugsley’s Shimmer (2022) offers a character for every reading mood…poignant and moving.”—Buried in Print

Praise for Alex Pugsley

“Aubrey McKee is no austere, white-walled art gallery of a novel. It’s abundant, highly decorated, and unafraid of extravagance, of stylistic excess … From ordinary incidents — a childhood acquaintance, marital strife, a wedding — as well as a few extraordinary ones, Aubrey McKee builds a dazzling and complicated world, a childhood in Halifax as a vibrant universe in itself. While Pugsley’s literary performance is an immediate delight, the portrait of the early days of a ‘wayward oddity’ lingers long after.”—Toronto Star

“Evoking comparisons in both style and substance to the work of John Irving and Robertson Davies in its assemblage of perceptive, richly detailed character studies … The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight.”—Kirkus

“Although many peoples’ stories comprise the whole of Aubrey McKee, the city of Halifax is also a feature character … the reverence Pugsley provides about Halifax will resonate with anyone thinking about their own hometown, no matter its size or location … The richly defined personalities in Aubrey McKee are void of pretense or judgment and are, at once, knowable. Like a favourite song, it’s the hook that makes the adventures of Aubrey McKee and those he cares about so memorable.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“Pugsley, equal parts poet and meticulous historian of his own private Halifax, has accomplished, with “Aubrey McKee,” a work of high literary art, remaking and claiming the city as his own once again in a sustained performance that pulses with that deep, radical love.”—John Delacourt, The Ottawa Review of Books

“The mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic Halifax depicted in Aubrey McKee is as enchanted as it is benighted, an adolescent fever-dream. This is a rollicking, strange and unforgettable coming of age novel unlike anything you’ve ever read.”—Lynn Coady, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Hellgoing

“His prose style is among the finest anywhere: humorous, economical, deft without sacrificing accessibility, capable of laying bare the complicated depths, the tenderness, and the strangeness of personal relationships.”—Roo Borson, Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author of Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

“Alex Pugsley’s novel, Aubrey McKee, is a whip-smart portrait of the artist at the end of the twentieth century. Funny and wildly intelligent, it captures a somewhat tragic cohort of young, ambitious Haligonians trying to become themselves, all seen through the eyes of the narrator, a young man of incomplete wisdom. In quicksilver prose, Pugsley shows us a whole generation, some of whom are lost, some found, but all viewed with a profound, comic humanity.”—Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Bellevue Square

“A wonderful book, it absolutely floored me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read anything like it … I found Aubrey McKee to be more reminiscent of Dubliners by James Joyce, not only because the sense of place is so strong, but because the narrative in this book is told through interconnected stories.”—Bookin’

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man’s reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life.

What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn’t do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he’s overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we’re all doing here. So he’s made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy.

Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what’s been thought and said. But Caroline is on her own path, one that compels Phil to rethink what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century. In Estates Large and Small Ray Robertson renders one man’s reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.

Praise for Estates Large and Small

“This wry novel follows a struggling used bookstore owner and Grateful Dead fan as he grudgingly moves his store online, decides to teach himself two millenniums of Western philosophy, falls in love and attempts to pin down the point of life.”—New York Times

“Ray Robertson asks us to think about life as a rental, and to make the best out of it before our lease runs out.”—Literary Review of Canada

“Estates Large and Small is a thoughtful book that manages to make its serious existential themes both entertaining and, yes, hopeful.”—Ottawa Review of Books

“The issues, relationships and real-life collisions in the novel keep reminding the reader that an intellectual exercise by itself doesn’t offer much beyond intellectual satisfaction. Estates Large and Small offers so much more if you can handle the trepidation it shares.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“With the publication of Estates Large and Small, novelist Ray Robertson succeeds in reminding his readers just what it means to live, love, and (when the time comes) to say goodbye. Deftly crafted and memorable characters, a narrative storyline laced with humor and acute observation.”—Midwest Book Review

“Chatham-born author Ray Robertson likes to tell a story in his novels that makes his readers ponder their own lives. He’s hit the mark again with Estates Large and Small.”—Chatham Daily News

“Ray Robertson’s novel Estates Large and Small is both poignant and heartwarming.”—Largehearted Boy

“A warmhearted and unconventional love story that’s also an opportunity for a gentle encounter with some of life’s fundamental questions … With Phil’s droll humor and world-weary cynicism, and Caroline’s clear-eyed determination to live her final days on her own terms, the two make for an appealing couple. Like the philosophers they encounter, Estates Large and Small only hints at answers to life’s deepest mysteries, but it’s a wise reminder that the journey is really the point.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

Praise for Ray Robertson

“While How to Die is a slim book, it offers some hefty insights, leavened with frequent, self-effacing humour. There are numerous passages here which, while quick to read (the book is very accessible, despite its philosophical bona fides), nonetheless take hours to fully internalize … Brilliant.” —Toronto Star

“Robertson is a moral writer and a bitingly intelligent one, a man who writes with penetrating insight of what needs to be written about: beauty, truth and goodness.”—Globe and Mail

“Heartfelt, funny, rigorous, practical without ever being preachy … a book that feels like a friend.”—Montreal Gazette

“Sharp-tongued … as Robertson ponders family and home as well as ‘what it means to love someone and to lose someone and to have to go on living anyway,’ he presents an intriguing character whose very real troubles are offset by bright flashes of hope.”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the country’s finest literary voices.”—National Post

“Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson has found a road back in this splendid and intriguing book [Why Not: Fifteen Reasons to Live].”—Jim Harrison

A poignant and evocative novel about the bonds of family and the gifts offered by the land

When a troubled father and his estranged teenage daughter head out onto the land in search of the family trapline, they find their way back to themselves, and to each other

Deep in the night, Matthew paces the house, unable to rest. Though his sixteen-year-old daughter, Holly, lies sleeping on the other side of the bedroom door, she is light years away from him. How can he bridge the gap between them when he can’t shake the emptiness he feels inside? Holly knows her father is drifting further from her; what she doesn’t understand is why. Could it be her fault that he seems intent on throwing everything away, including their relationship?

Following a devastating tragedy, Matthew and Holly head out onto the land in search of a long-lost cabin on the family trapline, miles from the Cree community they once called home. But each of them is searching for something more than a place. Matthew hopes to reconnect with the father he has just lost; Holly goes with him because she knows the father she is afraid of losing won’t be able to walk away.

When things go wrong during the journey, they find they have only each other to turn to for support. What happens to father and daughter on the land will test them, and eventually heal them, in ways they never thought possible.

_________________

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General's Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

_________________

RAWI HAGE was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Award. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Giller Prize. His third novel, Carnival, told from the perspective of a taxi driver, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Award and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Do you believe in angels?

When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene’s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way.

Everything Affects Everyone, is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.

*Instant National Bestseller

In this explosive new thriller from international bestselling author Daniel Kalla, an experimental vaccine is deployed to battle a lethal outbreak—until patients start dying of unknown causes.

An ordinary day
The city of Seattle is stunned when a deadly bacteria tears through a nearby Bible camp. Early tests reveal the illness is a form of meningitis, and the camp’s residents are among its most vulnerable victims: children and teenagers.

A new vaccine
Facing a rapidly rising death rate, Seattle’s chief public health officer, Lisa Dyer, and her team quickly take all steps necessary to contain the devastating outbreak. And when further testing reveals that the strain of the bacteria is one that caused catastrophic losses in Iceland six months before, Lisa decides to take a drastic step: she contacts Nathan Hull, vice president of a pharmaceutical company that is doing final-phase trials on a viable vaccine, and asks him to release it early for use on the city’s population.

An epidemic in the making
Lisa gets the go-ahead on her controversial plan, despite the protests of dubious government officials, anti-vaxxers, and even those on her own team. Vaccine clinics roll out across the city, and the risky strategy appears to be working, leaving Lisa, Nathan, and thousands of others breathing a sigh of relief. Until people start dying from mysterious and horrific causes—and the vaccine itself is implicated.

But what if science isn’t to blame?

Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.

A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.

Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.

All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.

______________

EVA CROCKER is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel All I Ask, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her short story collection, Barrelling Forward, won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Writer Award, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, and was a National Post Best Book.

Thirteen glittering, surprising, and darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives, from two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Alix Ohlin.

In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics and drinking cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might be willing to trade for a life of such elegant comfort. And in “The Universal Particular,” Tamar welcomes her husband’s young stepcousin into her home, only to find her cool suburban life knocked askew in ways she cannot quite understand. 

Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp — sparkling with pain, humour, and beauty.

______________

ALIX OHLIN is the author of six books, including the novels Inside and Dual Citizens, which were both finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives in Vancouver, where she chairs the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. 

New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids

Junior Library Guild Selection

Chicago Public Library Best of the Best

About the Book

Perfect for fans of Narwhal and Jelly, Arlo & Pips: King of the Birds is the first in a new early graphic chapter book series about the friendship between Arlo, an arrogant crow, and a sarcastic little bird named Pips. 

Like most crows, Arlo has a big brain. But Arlo has something else: a little pal who’s not afraid to tell him when he’s being insufferable!

In the first of three episodes, a battle of the brains and bird-to-bird banter soon turns into an unexpected friendship. Arlo and Pips' adventures include a visit the big city and the beach on their hunt for shiny things and French fries. Cool crow facts are included throughout the book.

Everyone's crowing about Arlo & Pips, with Kirkus praising it as "a perfect match for newly independent readers"!

More praise for Arlo & Pips #1: King of the Crows: A New York Public Library Best Book * A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best * A Junior Library Guild Selection * "An unexpected friendship story! In three short graphic chapters marked by [Gravel’s] signature sly humor, facts about crows are sprinkled throughout, making the reader believe that maybe crows are truly as amazing as Arlo says.” —The Horn Book (starred review)

Critical Praise

“Fun and informative! This book will FLY off the shelves!” - Ben Clanton, bestselling author of the Narwhal and Jelly series

"Straightforward sentences, limited color scheme, and thick black outlines make this a perfect match for newly independent readers. Through Pips’ inquisitiveness and Arlo’s desire to prove himself, readers also learn much about the intelligence, diet, and behavior of crows. A charming treasure." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“It's an unexpected friendship story! In three short graphic chapters marked by [Gravel's] signature sly humor, facts about crows are sprinkled throughout...making the reader believe that maybe crows are truly as amazing as Arlo says.” - Horn Book (starred review)

"Gravel brings the smart attitude of her Disgusting Critters series to a more fictional narrative here, and it’s just as informative and accessible in its provision of kid-pleasing facts...Aspiring birders with a flair for the dramatic may be particularly drawn to Arlo’s braggadocio." - Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

"This simple story of would-be friendship [has] Gravel's distinctive panels and snappy dialogue...crow facts appear throughout like cereal-box prizes" - Publishers Weekly

Together in a single volume, two beloved novels by one of our most celebrated and important writers.

Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends-each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.
     By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother--who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld--journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy's arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth. Winner of the Toronto Book Award.
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In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here--June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.
     The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

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DIONNE BRAND’s literary credentials are legion. Her latest novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected a Best Book by the LA Times; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing, and from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.

From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read

Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions.

Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating bass notes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.

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Ian Williams is the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Reproduction . His last poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. Williams holds a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. Ian Williams currently resides in Vancouver, BC.