When underachieving writer Larry Mann is granted the lucrative opportunity to ghostwrite the memoirs of the notorious and eccentric businessman-turned-politician Maxime Montblanc, he accepts immediately, tantalized by the financial benefits he’s promised. However, as the two men begin to learn about and confide in one another, hints of their past …

Seven Floors Down follows the lives of Ryder and Kendall through bouts of homicide and homelessness, beginning when Ryder gets out of jail and crashes with his alcoholic friend who, on the verge of being evicted, remains infuriated with an ex-cop who owes him thousands. Kendall is a raconteur who entertains with countless stories, often while lying …

Told from two points of view—a mother and her daughter—Mad Cow examines farming life in small-town Alberta, a life fourteen-year-old Allyson wants only to escape. Meanwhile her mother, Donna, dealing with her own assortment of problems and setbacks, soldiers on through the daunting days. But when a strange affliction starts picking off the loca …

Preying on loving parents is second nature to Suzanne Foley. So is drinking to oblivion while shilling for the publicly-supported Alberta Broadcasting System (ABS). When new management from Toronto threatens to gut the station, Suzanne rallies reluctant coworkers to fight back. Sex with a younger man, intrusive memories and regular trips to the pre …

When Annika Torrey is diagnosed with cancer, she has no one in her life she can turn to.  Divorced and estranged from her fundamentalist family, she sells her life insurance policy for cash, hoping to live out her final days in peace. But then Annika is given a rare second chance. Meanwhile, struggling real-estate agent Matt Campbell is drowning in …

Highlighting the tension between insiders and outsiders, and set against a sinister backdrop, Fireweed and Bracken follows the life of Effie Cambridge who, awkward and searching, leaves her complicated life in Ontario to work as a high school teacher in Charlottetown, PEI, where she makes friends, courts rejection, finds love, and struggles to come …

Cheap Thrills takes place over the course of a single weekend, beginning with the incessantly stoned Ethan and his roommate Phil discovering the body of their weed dealer in a Vancouver alley alongside a box of porno magazines and crime noir paperbacks. Tasked by his eccentric boss with locating the money the dealer had been carrying, gang member W …

Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly unhinged Joseph Reiser forms “Walden”, a collective of Luddite devote …

Twenty-five years after his father Gord died in a car accident, Richard gets a call from his cousin Tony, who is working on a theory that Gord's death was orchestrated by Al Forzante, Gord's former boss and a powerful union leader. With his own career and marriage sputtering, Richard is reluctant to believe Tony, inclined instead to cling to the on …

What happens when the narrator is removed from a story? When the author's real life is fictionalized instead, so that creator and creation relate on the same existential ground with no middleman? Chameleon (Days) is such an experiment in storytelling, a literary novel that explores an author's psychotic break as he prepares to write an idea he has …

Alarmed that Canada Post keeps losing money, Ariadne Jensen, a woman in her fifties, pitches the CEO with a scheme to save the corporation: she will get people to start writing and mailing letters again. As an inspiration to others, Ariadne writes bundles of letters for all to see; some are historical fiction, while others are drawn from her own co …

Twenty-five years after his father Gord died in a car accident, Richard gets a call from his cousin Tony, who is working on a theory that Gord’s death was orchestrated by Al Forzante, Gord's former boss and a powerful union leader. With his own career and marriage sputtering, Richard is reluctant to believe Tony, inclined instead to cling to the …

Though But When We Look Closer is a collection of eighteen stories that approaches its subjects from a parade of landscapes, running through these tales is a singular motif--taking control. Characters find themselves in skins they wish to shed, with vices held close and with voices that must be heard. Whether it be seeking a life in a foreign land, …

Aaron Cordic and Samantha Riske are a couple of twenty-something hypochondriacs living in east-end Toronto. While Aaron works part-time at a bathroom supply store, donning surgical masks, plastic gloves, and a backpack full of sanitary products, Samantha hides herself away in their apartment, tip-toeing around naked and spying on the neighbours. Be …

Cell: no service. Email: down. Internet: off. TV: nothing. Radio: static. Communication: minimal. Chaos: unstoppable. Press Any Key to Start. PR hack Tristan Schultz is buried deep in the endless code of Millennial life, slogging away for a major pharmaceutical company in Seattle. Hopelessly drowning in a world of texts, emails, Tweets and status u …

Cell: no service. Email: down. Internet: off. TV: nothing. Radio: static. Communication: minimal. Chaos: unstoppable. Press Any Key to Start. PR hack Tristan Schultz is buried deep in the endless code of Millennial life, slogging away for a major pharmaceutical company in Seattle. Hopelessly drowning in a world of texts, emails, Tweets and status u …

Meet The Gorgons The Legionnaires Chicken Treblinka The Statistics . . . Meet Dee, Gordyn, Em, and Jay, indecisive members of the greatest New Wave band to ever spring from River Bend City. Before they graduate from high school and flee a mill town that's seen better days, these ambitious friends (two sets of siblings) aim to make something from no …

A heartbroken derelict. An abruptly idealistic executive. A father trying to reconnect with his daughters. Three men inhabiting the same neighbourhood with completely divergent lives come together in a collision that will leave each of them changed forever. In his debut novel, Michael Knox evokes, in cinematic prose, a glimpse of the complexity of …

Robin Kent doesn't understand how everyone around her, including her husband, is so certain of everything. The only explanation is that they're all following the same Guidebook--a copy of which Robin has yet to receive. When a co-worker at her call centre reveals his secret, Robin is sure he's offering more than just a way out of a depressing job, …

This is the manuscript of Xavier Bernard, an average, mundane and altogether unexceptional author who has attempted to claw back his lackluster life story by writing it himself. Free to invent the facts and improve on truth, he will stop at nothing to get the ending he desires. But when his closest friend begins to separate truth from fiction, spot …

Christian McPherson's exciting new novel is a portrait of a woman coming unglued after devastating events send her spiraling out of control. Between popping pills and drinking vodka, Julie Cooper tries her best to do what she has always done: carry on. But when the line between what is real and what is imaginary becomes blurred, a psychotic breakdo …

Ethan Reid is a 24-year-old alcoholic who spends his nights drifting between bars, drinking excessively to the point where he can no longer remember. In Toronto he meets a beautiful girl named Natalie, who forces him to question his solitary lifestyle. But when their relationship turns sour, Ethan retreats into the city's underground drug world, sp …

A once blue-collar town, Peacefield has surrendered to the illusion of affluence. But for some, the newcomers and their wealth are not welcome. Tension and division are a way of life. One night, the otherwise bucolic town explodes with gunfire. Hostages are taken and the local police department, hampered by budget cuts, is caught flat-footed. Const …

Ben Dunn has not been trafficking marijuana to his high school students. He has, however, been intimate with one, which is probably why the authorities come looking for him one afternoon. After a night spent in the drunk-tank, Ben commissions his friend's help in planning a revenge-plot against the fellow teacher he blames for his forced removal fr …

When English Professor Marta Spëk is offered a film consultant's contract, she's fighting a bad case of year-end doldrums. She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity - or at the very least supply interesting material for her famil …

Donna and Raymond would be the first to admit their 25-year union wasn't perfect. But despite all its various blemishes, their life together works, or at least it did until, one frigid November night, in a field just a few miles from their home, one reckless act throws their lives into a tailspin. Donna is willing to follow a winding path to peace, …

Writer Danny Bayle's life is in shambles. His true love has left him and his grandfather -- the last and most important influence in his life -- has just passed away. Danny has spent the last few months languishing, unable to write a single word, but at the urging of a friend ventures out into the world in an attempt to jumpstart a new life, befrie …

A rookie novelist faces infamy and fortune when a young boy mimics the suicidal protagonist in his book. After close to five years covering trials, a court reporter suddenly finds his life entangled with the outcome of a manslaughter case. A fourth-year English major and rugby star wrestles with a growing disdain for academia as his mother succumbs …

Who is Johnny Kicker? A murderer, a prophet, a scapegoat, a puppet, a degenerate, a hero, and a counter-revolutionary. Since the invention of music, those who perform it have been accused of sedition. And while rock 'n' roll has forever aspired to become the anthem of revolution, its momentum has always petered out or collapsed upon itself. That is …

Often controversial, sometimes sexual, and not without black humour, Love on the Killing Floor opens in Toronto in 1992 with Gilchrist, a down-and-out portrait photographer, being searched on a bus in the middle of the night by police he suspects are looking for a local rapist. His town is changing. Life wasn't always like this. But now, with an es …

A deeply moving meditation on love and loss, the elusiveness of truth, and the frail and befuddled mind of a deeply haunted man, this gripping, tragic and densely atmospheric novel follows the exploits of one Chris Needham as he attempts to traverse the minefield of his life along the pockmarked moonscape of the British Columbia coast.

Examining the …

In 1980, while working in a warehouse, Lane Courtney takes stock in the family myth that he is a direct descendant of Reginald Fitz Urse, one of the knights who martyred Saint Becket in 1170. His laconic, autobiographical reflections are interwoven with numerous misadventures as he hangs out at the Hotel Isabella and the Warwick's infamous strip lo …

A penetrating and unflinching examination of the modern Canadian male, Monument is told through the eyes of Seth Wilhelm, a talented young hockey player whose career is cut short by injury, sending him spiralling out of control. A failed stint at college sets the stage for a second fall from grace, a car accident which claims the life of his new gi …

Tennis prodigy Olie Wood was once the toast of professional sports. He was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He gave prime ministers lessons, dated movie stars, and was rumoured to have been intimate with Madonna. (He'll neither confirm nor deny.) But a bizarre incident at the Australian Open involving a tragically murdered kookaburra, …

Two voices, two families, two interweaving narratives with thirty years dividing them. In 1972 Birdie Cormack enters a highly controversial experiment in Toronto. Her story unfolds piece by fascinating piece, mostly by way of a compelling series of letters written to her parents. And in 2002 Jeremy Jacks returns to the West Coast after a failed bid …

Cut loose at the end of a long and violent hockey career prolonged by steroids and numbed by liquor, ex-enforcer Billy Purdy discovers that the soon-to-be-published novel of a celebrated politician's son is in fact Billy's father's own, taken word for word from the original published, and promptly forgotten, some forty years before. Allowing the ru …