Charlotte--a gifted but broken jazz singer--has found security and support under the roof of an overbearing French patroness of the arts, only to become trapped by her own dependence. There are no bars on the windows and no locks on the doors, but Charlotte is very much a prisoner in an opulent but unsympathetic world in which her self-worth is contingent...

Set in the small town of Grenville, Ontario, a setting perhaps familiar to the reader from the author's previous novel Cadillac Road, this story progresses from the 1950s through the 1980s. In 1940, five-year-old Martin Thorton fell from the family's apartment balcony, suffering catastrophic and permanent injuries. His accident plays a role in everything...

In this fractured familial story, Esther Prat reflects on the secrets, lies, and pain that haunt her life. Born on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, as an infant she is unceremoniously taken to Montreal, Quebec, to spend the first ten years of her life with an affluent Jewish family. Upon the death of her "daddy," she is not allowed to attend his funeral...

When British hat manufacturer Christopher Brooke is arrested under Regulation 18B in June 1940 a slow process of personal disintegration begins. Taking us into the pre-war political era of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, Mad Hatter delves into the lives of Britons, tracking them through a darkening time. Irish farm girl, Mary Byrne, arrives in England in...

The first of two-part novel, Itzel I tells the story of three disparate characters swept up in the drama of the Mexican student movement of 1968 whose ending in the Massacre in Tlatelolco on October 2nd, a date now always commemorated in Mexico, changed their lives forever. Broad in scope and exuberant in style in the best tradition of Latin American...

A tour guide leads a Valentine's Day-themed ghost walk, visiting the sites of horrific, yet romantic, deaths. A homicide cop solves tough cases using tips from his plants. Scientists discover a new species of religiously observant gophers, and a young math whiz, on the hunt for her escaped boa constrictor, ponders the theory of multiple worlds. Replete...

The first work of its kind in Canada, this book explores 11 first-rate actors' perceptions and comments in relation to performing Shakespeare in order to offer a sense of what these actors mean by ‘the work’. Colourful, lively, with strong considerations of technique and interpretation, this book gives Canadian actors a rare and generous opportunity to...

A young, mixed-race composer, raised without meaningful connections to his Chinese heritage and struggling with identity issues, travels to China in search of his long-missing uncle, an uncle who vanished in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. An Idea About My Dead Uncle--winner of the inaugural Guernica Prize for the best unpublished novel manuscript--is...

When Alexandra attempts to end an abusive marriage, her husband Tareq abducts their infant daughters from their Montreal home and deposits them with his family in a primitive village in Jordan. Trying to retrieve them through legal means, Alexandra comes face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to...

French journalist Marc Taragon is at the apex of his career in 2007. A tenacious idealist, Taragon has spent the last thirty years attempting to bring to readers the truths about the wars and political intrigues of the region. He is unsparing in his criticism of extremists and has earned many enemies. He agrees to be interviewed in Cyprus, by a young...

Like his three siblings, 32-year-old Alfredo “Freddy Flowers” Falconi has led two lives: the idyllic one before “The Incident”--his mother's 1984 death--and the complicated one afterward. He was just eight-years-old when his father abandoned the family, and nine when his oldest brother, “Small Carm,” covered up the circumstances of Rosa Falconi's demise to...

It is 1955, and the three Fayette sisters have lived their whole lives in the enchanting French Quarter of New Orleans. Though neglected by their parents, they share a close bond with one another?from afternoons in their small, shared bedroom, to trying to speak with ghosts beneath the sweeping trees in their garden. When the middle sister Constance...

A hijacking in deeper Johannesburg goes horribly wrong. Zoe du Plessis, a paleontologist of Afrikaner origin, is suddenly confronted with her family's secret, seemingly wrapped in an old Xhosa's spell. As she heads for the Kalahari Desert in search of early human fossils, Zoe embarks on an inner journey into the unredeemable sense of guilt haunting her...

Philipovna: The Daughter of Sorrow is a creative non-fiction based on the author's mother's surviving the holodomor [the Ukrainian starvation] in the early 1930's. It is the story of an orphan who goes to live with her aunt in a rural village in the Ukrainian countryside. The aunt swears on her dead sister's Bible that Vera Philipovna will survive no matter...

In 2019 Barbie turns 60. Never only a toy, she defines the stellar. In Plastic's Republic, Giovanna Riccio delves into Barbie's impact on female beauty highlighting how plasticity in body and persona have allowed the doll to remain top-diva. Other poems bring to life, Mattel's movers-n-shakers who created Barbie to be their in-house money maker. Riccio's...

A Voluntary Crucifixion traces the story of 20th century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J MacKinnon?s life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society —from the bottom up. A Voluntary Crucifixion...

When Rosemary grows tired of her father's overstatements and boasting with respect to her supernatural powers, which includes the ability to create flowers just by looking at their images, she decides to flee to a sanctuary far from Pandemville, her hometown. Together with a friend, and pursued by an angry father, Rosemary is sent on a series of journeys in...

Small things is a book of mini-anti-essays, part of Sky Gilbert's project to dismantle and challenge the rigid classifications of genre, thus challenging 21st century notions of truth. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, Foucault, and the post-structuralist project, the small writings in small things are story, essay, and memoir combined. They question the notion that...

Paul, an aspiring writer in his mid-twenties, marries Carlos, a boyfriend he lived with in Guatemala; brings him Montreal, and looks forward to a life of bliss. Things go wrong from the beginning, and the trouble Carlos causes leaves Paul little time for much else—and they break up. Bill, whom Paul sees as the father he always wanted, helps him overcome his...

The Shining Fragments is a family saga about the Irish in Canada that explores the ramifications of abandonment, obsession, love, memory, and visionary power. Spanning the years 1882-1904, it follows Joseph Conlon from his early childhood in Ulster to his experiences of youth and adulthood as an immigrant. Left behind as a small boy on a Toronto...

Myth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros’ collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph...