Original, witty, and subtle, these stories feature characters who must navigate life in a small town, and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Kathleen Winter.

This collection of beautifully crafted short stories features complex characters whose internal struggles manifest in their most intimate relationships, told by a writer with a compassiona …

Moving, entertaining, and witty, A Thousand Consolations is a literary romantic comedy for fans of David Nicholls’s Us and Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers.

Paula doesn’t put much faith in the candles she designs for her customers, which promise to cure everything from unrequited love to ingrown toenails; it’s just a business she started after he …

Sonja Danychuk, a serious and introverted student with dirt-poor immigrant parents, takes pride in her intellectual and academic achievements—essential skills to help her survive and eventually leave small-town Davenport in Northern Ontario. When her father is cut down by a fatal heart attack, Sonja must find a way to pay for university, so she a …

It’s 1947 in Lahore, and the Sharma family is forced to flee their home during the violence of the Partition of India. As the train tracks measure the ever-growing distance between Varoon and his mother, who vanished during the panic to escape, the boy is thrust towards an uncertain future.

Forty years later, Varoon’s grown son, Anush, desperat …

The year is 1885 and Abigail Peacock is resisting what seems to be an inevitable future—a sensible career as a teacher and marriage to the earnestly attentive local storeowner.

But then she buys a rifle, and everything changes.

This Godforsaken Place is the absorbing tale of one tenacious woman’s journey set against dramatic myths of the Canadi …

Winner of the 2015 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
A Globe and Mail top 100 pick for 2014
Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal

Twelve short stories that examine what happens in the lives of characters who discover shocking truths about the people they thought they knew best.

Whether set in a cottage or a Montreal market, …

Paul Rasmussen is a young ethnographer and academic recovering from prostate cancer. Broken, he retreats to the remote forests and towns of the Immitoin Valley. As an outsider, he discovers how difficult it is to know a place, let alone become a part of it. Then, a drowned man and a series of encounters with the locals force him to confront the val …

Winner of the 2015 Saskatchewan Book Awards University of Regina Book of the Year Award

In 1939, Kay Jeynes, a lively, ambitious young working-class woman, goes to work for the only Japanese businessman in town, the elderly, wealthy, Oxford-educated Mr. Miyashita. Despite differences in their age, race, and class, a friendship develops between them …

In her forties, Livvy Alvarsson hopes to be a bone marrow donor for her much-loved younger brother, Stephen. Instead, she discovers she has no idea who she is. This is the second great loss she has suffered, for eleven years earlier her four-year-old son, Daniel, disappeared. Armed with a few clues from wartime England, she embarks on a search for …

Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis settlement of Lac St. Anne. Known as Manito Sakahigan in Cree, “Spirit Lake” has been renamed for the patron saint of childbirth. It is here that people journey in search of tradition, redemption, and miracles.

On this harsh and beautiful land, four interconnected people try to make a lif …

Marta Elzinga has been searching for a sign. When she spots an elusive mink on the shoreline of the Toronto Island Airport, she thinks it is a message. The pigeon that boards the subway at Bathurst Station is the second sign. But how to read these dispatches?

Plagued with indecision and prone to magical thinking, Marta needs direction. A floundering …

In the not-too-distant future, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy lives a challenging and unfamiliar life. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping on an isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and friend, Thomson. When the footprints of a thieving child start appearing in their garden, the family must come together to protect both the child and …

Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2014Edmonton Public Library Alberta Readers' Choice Award

When Marie MacPherson, a mother of two, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at thirty-nine, she feels guilty. Her best friend, Elizabeth, has never been able to conceive, despite years of fertility treatments. Marie's dilemma is f …

With unsentimental prose and ironic dialogue, Katie Boland brings to life a variety of characters who all have one thing in common—a need for something more. A literary debut by a refreshing new voice in fiction, the stories in Eat Your Heart Out are about the haunted and heartbroken, about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. From a sixteen-yea …

The nature of relationships is skilfully illuminated in this collection of stories by award-winning author Holley Rubinsky. South of Elfrida delves into the lives of those coming face to face with personal truths that require resilience, humour and the ability to change.

With a clear eye for the complexities of the human heart, Rubinsky’s stories …

Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal

Cadillac Couches is a picaresque road trip novel that journeys from prairie to big city and back again. A quixotic tale set in the late nineties and framed by the popular Edmonton Folk Music Festival, it follows two music-smitten twentysomething women as they search for love and purpose. A …

Anglophone Imogene Jackson grew up in an English suburb on the uneasy edge of a francophone world. At the age of nineteen she quit college to marry a shoemaker from the close-knit French village of Saint-Ange-du-Lac. For ten years she has lived with her husband, Thomas, above his family's historic shoe shop, immersed in village life. When Thomas di …

During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soon realizes that John is no ordinary soldier, and that he …

Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today's Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia's life is disrupted when Luis's brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe's arrival and Liliana's adolescent restlessness force Celia to ex …

Winner of the 2012 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2012 Edmonton Public Library Alberta Readers' Choice Award

In 1941, a young man imagines thrilling battles and heroic acts when he lies about his age and joins the army. Assigned to the Winnipeg Grenadiers, part of the Canadian army in Hong Kong, Freddy McKee becomes …

Cedric Johnson is a middle-aged insurance broker with an unusual problem. He seems to be physically flashing back to pivotal moments from his past. It begins when his third-grade teacher notices a startling awareness in an otherwise unremarkable boy. Next, Cedric inhabits his fourteen-year-old body. He continues to travel through the life he’s al …

Shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

Will Thorne is a stalled poet, married to Judy, a wildly successful celebrity economist. Pressured by a starving fellow poet, Will establishes The Poets’ Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But when Will meets his muse, the enigmatic and athletic Lily White, h …

Welcome to Poplar Grove, a farming community with three generations of Dutch-Canadians. Life in the New World has not become less complicated as the decades have passed, and now, a set of dying customs is about to collide with the ways of a new generation.

The balance is shifting between people comfortable holding hymnals and cleaning cows’ teat …

Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal

It’s the last ski weekend of the season and a mishmash of snow-enthusiasts is on its way to a remote backwoods cabin. In an odd pilgrimage through the mountains, the townsfolk of Coalton—from the ski bum to the urbanite—embark on a bizarre adventure that walks the line between comedy …

It's the mid-1920s and New York is shimmering with the hope and vigour of a younger generation in headlong pursuit of greater freedoms and pleasures. Watching from the sidelines, nineteen-year-old Savanna Mason struggles with the gravity of her perceived failures, finding release and security in the water. Savi believes that her swimming has the po …

Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, Mark Anthony Jarman's impressive debut collection of nine short stories, presents characters assembled from the depths of the local bars, under the influence, on the run, out of work. They are infused with a dark smoke drawn from the raw side of life—stained, imperfect, energetic and earthy—and fueled by a desire …

The colony of British Columbia, 1863. Boston Jim Milroy, a lone trapper and trader with an eidetic memory and a tragic unreckoned past, has become obsessed with reciprocating a seemingly minor kindness from the loquacious Dora Hume, a settler in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Dora's kindness and her life story both haunt Boston Jim, and …

Lila, a talented pianist and wife to Rob, has decided she cannot passively follow a score someone else has written—in her musical career and her marriage. As she struggles in her role as daughter to a mother who is dying of cancer, Lila finds that Kevin, a violinist and Lila’s musical partner, helps to keep her love of music in tune through try …

On a Wednesday in July 1961, Jacqueline Burrows begins her day perched on the cool concrete of her front steps, smoking. Jacqueline is the mother of three children, including her sweet, difficult daughter, Sylvie. It's only 7:00 AM, but Jacqueline's children are awake and tearing through the neighborhood.

In a story that deals with the extraordinar …

Winner of a 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that make all the difference, like chromosomes, sperm, bugs or an endangered seabird that nests in old-growth forests. But, what’s big or what’s little depends entirely on your perspective. Faye Pearson is a three-and-a-half-foot tall female …

Set partially in Vancouver, partially on a farm in rural Ontario and partially in West Africa, Sweetness from Ashes is a novel about family in its various forms. When Sheila, Jenny and Chris decide to respect a deceased relative’s wishes, and return the ashes to the family farm, the three begin a journey that takes them from their present-day liv …

Received an honourable mention on the Globe and Mail's top first fiction for 2008

Shari Lapena takes the wit of David Sedaris and the outrageousness of Douglas Coupland to create a dark, hilarious and wildly inventive contemporary comedy about how the past can come back to haunt you. Literally.

In Things Go Flying, Harold Walker is desperately av …

In One Chrysanthemum, it is 1964 and Misako Imai is a young Tokyo housewife with a secret. When she was a child living in her grandfather’s dark, wartime Buddhist temple in the northern prefecture of Niigata, she became aware of a special sensitivity that allowed her to see visions of things that were currently happening—but in another place—o …

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006

It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.

It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impos …

Meet Tyrone Lock: born of farmers' stock; overeducated, underemployed. An inveterate pick-nose and clandestine squeezer of Revels in the supermarket. Disaffected in a way that Adrian Mole would recognize (though as Tyrone takes pains to point out, he's hardly a tortured artist; his BA was in Economics). Inexplicably involved with the lovely, pamper …

At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak i …

Succession is a story cycle about a rural community in transition. It follows Al, a musician burned out from too many nights playing the same classic rock songs, as he returns from Vancouver to the farm where he grew up in the Bearspaw district near Calgary.

Al's story is intertwined with those of his family, friends, and neighbours, as they struggl …