Fiction Books

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

A fast-paced, hilarious, and ultimately hopeful novel for anyone who has ever worried they might be a terrible person—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.

Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favorite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her.

As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself.

Brimming with quirky humor, charm, and heart, Interesting Facts about Space effortlessly shows us the power of revealing our secret shames, the most beautifully human parts of us all.

The Boys meets Assistant to the Villain in the electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench. Filled with a queer and neurodiverse cast, Villain asks the question: what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse.

The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.

But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she’ll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

For readers of Miriam Toews and Claire Keegan, an immersive and deeply poignant new novel set on the Rock about female friendship and found family

Ruby Nolan is a new widow. Hidden in her grief and guilt for her husband, Joe, is a sense that she is free from a marriage she never wanted. But how can she possibly begin again? An encounter with Maxine, a pregnant teen who reminds Ruby of her own sorry past, and a shocking revelation from her mother, Vera, send Ruby on a collision course with old truths and regrets and on a mission to help Maxine whether she wants it or not. While a friend warns Ruby that you can’t help anyone until you help yourself, it’s a lesson Ruby has to learn the hard way if she’s going to find any real peace.

Set over the course of one winter in 1990s St. John’s and infused with the rich culture and characters of the Rock, The Brink of Something Beautiful is the life-affirming, ultimately hopeful story about how women lift each other up and figure themselves out.

An absorbing and heartfelt new novel about three people looking for a future when the world hangs by a thread, for readers of Moon on the Crusted Snow and The Future

Pauline has not spoken to her sister, Mei, in two decades, not since before the world changed. A rare letter arrives asking Pauline to return to their old neighbourhood to care for Mei’s young daughter while Mei goes to find work.

Twelve-year-old Jing is living in the Children’s House, where all the parentless children stay while their parents work at the Farms. She hasn’t heard from her mother in months and the food deliveries they were promised have dwindled. Her only friends in the neighbourhood are a crow named Iris, an older boy named Julian, and the ghosts of her ancestors in their abandoned apartment.

Julian, once a star athlete and student with a bright future, is one of the only young men left on Wonderland Road. He can’t leave his parents, and he knows there is nowhere left to go. But Julian dreams of a boy he met and a kiss shared in what feels like another lifetime.

These three people will cross paths on Wonderland Road, a community trying to survive in a world of massive disruption and uncertainty. When the future feels poised on a knife’s edge, they must find a way forward.

An unsettling, hypnotic descent into the visceral heart of “mommy horror,” Afterbirth is a story of fractured sisterhood, aching hunger, and irrevocable transformation—reverberating with the echoes of classic horror cinema.

In the wake of a fraught and ill-omened romance, Brooke arrives in Vancouver to care for her sister Izzy, who is preparing to undergo reproductive surgery. But Izzy’s rapidly decaying apartment building, its hallways stalked by an ominous figure known only as Medusa, offers little of the refuge the sisters need.

Seeking solace in the horror movies her ex-girlfriend loved, Brooke soon finds traces of horror bleeding from the screen into their lives. Old wounds reopen and new tensions surface. When Brooke begins to exhibit strange symptoms of her own, the line between self and sister blurs, and their concern for each other twists into a tangled obsession.

Eerie, threaded with yearning, and startlingly original, Emma Cleary’s haunting literary debut explores loneliness, motherhood, and the body’s threatened autonomy. The novel blooms with the dark desires we suppress or surrender to—until only one question remains: who, or what, will survive when all unravels?

What happens when we are “flies caught between glass and screen”? Or when we watch “the upended city spin” as youthful passions, restlessness, addictions and deep despair pound our body and brain? The need for love, for belonging, for redemption looms large. These brave, sensuous, cleverly crafted poems are controlled but what they hold within cannot be controlled. Immersed in a harsh reality seemingly without hope, Caverhill looks unflinchingly at darkness, at transience, at when life “suddenly splits into before and after.” This chapbook makes us walk the brink of the abyss, portrays struggle and survival, and the poet pushes us to the edge—we are always “on the verge of breaking open.”

–Zilka Joseph, Author of Sharp Blue Search of Flame, What Dread, and Lands I Live In

“This book is fast, furious, compelling, and angry as hell.” — Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author

The Boys meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation in this smart, imaginative, and evocative urban fantasy novel of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption, told with razor-sharp wit and affection, in which a young woman discovers the greatest superpower—for good or ill—is a properly executed spreadsheet.

Includes a bonus story for the paperback.

Anna does boring things for terrible people because even supervillains need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn’t glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy?

 As a temp, she’s just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called “hero” leaves her badly injured.  And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she’s the lucky one.

So, of course, then she gets laid off.

With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, this unlikely antihero discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks.

Because the key to everything in this dark comedy is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it. By tallying up the human cost these caped forces of nature wreak upon the world, she discovers that the line between good and evil is mostly marketing.  And with social media and viral videos, she can control that appearance.

It’s not too long before she’s employed once more, this time by one of the worst villains on earth. As she becomes an increasingly valuable lieutenant, she might just save the world.

A sharp, witty, modern debut, this subversive superhero story Hench explores the individual cost of justice through a fascinating mix of Millennial office politics, heroism measured through data science, body horror, and a profound misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. 

An extraordinary and deeply satisfying story about love, betrayal, mercy, and second chances—for readers of Elizabeth Strout and Ann Napolitano

When Stafford Hopkins loses his high-profile job in network television, his American colleagues rejoice. Canadian-born, his disdain for the industry has outrun his success, and few mourn his departure. His mercurial American wife in tow, he retreats to their luxury estate on Maui where he does what he has always done best―he rewrites the past. But a year into their exile, Stafford’s defenses are crumbling, and when a letter arrives with a request from the dead to do something for the living, he is summoned home to a farm, a lake, a prison, and a dance hall where the spirit of a boy named Bobby Shepherd is waiting for him.

“Patricia Finn has constructed something miraculous—an immersive, profoundly moving story about friendship, marriage, betrayal, and redemption that spans across generations and oceans. She writes with a philosopher’s deep wisdom, and a screenwriter’s talent for satisfyingly messy characters and wholly gripping plots. Combine all of that with the fact that The Golden Boy is also very, very funny, and what you’ve got is a novel that’s about as perfect as they come.” —Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding

What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot.  Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters’ lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women’s rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.

Praise for Voices in the Air

Kasia Jaronczyk’s Voices in the Air is a remarkable achievement – the novel depicts multiple characters as if they lived on two flaps with a hinge between them – a before and an after – with a dramatic event in the middle that changes everything for them all. The depiction of Marshal Law Poland is gritty and compelling, and the variety of post-emigration stories is psychologically subtle and profound.—Antanas Sileika The Death of Tony

Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day.

But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2.

Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become.

In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?

Praise for A Town With No Noise

The epigraph of Karen Smythe’s novel A Town with No Noise is a gorgeous poem by Derek Walcott, which alludes to stories hidden in plain sight. Smythe’s narrative wends through deceptively bucolic small-town Ontario, then Toronto, then northern Ontario, to arrive, finally, at the devastating story of a Jewish girl and her family in Nazi-occupied Norway. In this skilful intertextual weave of fiction and true history, the reader is shocked and moved to come upon a past in Europe that Smythe’s characters—in Canada—would prefer to forget. Smythe’s protagonist Samara has taken herself on a journey of revelation and remembrance, a journey that will make of her a writer: a healer and mender. And Karen Smythe has written this story: her novel is a captivating and brave achievement.—Dawn Promislow, author of Wan

Karen Smythe is a brilliant and insightful observer of her character’s inner lives, and A Town With No Noise is no exception. Smythe is a master at articulating tension between Samara and J., between their expectations and the reality that hides behind the facade of Upton Bay, and Samara’s discoveries of certain character’s pasts. Smythe’s descriptions are gorgeous and poetic, her pacing deft and precise. A beautiful novel that I couldn’t put down.—Danila Botha author of Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness

A compelling novel of family secrets and revelations, Karen Smythe’s A Town With No Noise lays bare WWII histories of cruelty, connection, and the bright flame of repair and healing that persists into our present day. Read this powerful, moving story of a young woman coming to terms with the past, and confronting our contemporary inequalities, for its clarity and urgent call for reckoning.—Elise Levine, author of Say This and This Wicked Tongue

With its inventive layering of a fictional narrative with footnotes, a transcription of a recording, a play, journalism, and historical details, the novel invites us to question how history is written, remembered, and forgotten, and to listen to the stories of others. A Town with No Noise will surprise, move, and push you to see the world differently, as only the best fiction can.—Kasia Jaronczyk, author of Voices in the Air and Lemons