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One night, Agatha Winter's phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It's the anniversary of their mother's accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches "willing amnesia": liberation by deliberately forgetting and disowning the past. But "willing amnesia" is no innovation: it runs in the family.

When she is confined to a nursing home after a series of debilitating strokes, Ruth Tyler struggles to accept the loss of her independence. Suddenly, having endless hours to sit and think, she begins to face the issues in her life she could once avoid, particularly her estrangement from her daughter, Annie. As Ruth awaits Annie's visit, she recalls the stormy relationship she had with her own mother and how profoundly it shaped her life.

Danny McMillan never knew that his father was abusing his mother, until a night of violence that shattered his family forever. Watching in the courtroom as his father is sentenced, Danny struggles with divided loyalties – to his mother on one side and to his father whom he wants to forgive on the other. After one trial is over, another begins for Danny. Social services and the police convince Danny’s mother that they must go into a victim protection program. Danny is asked to leave everything behind – his home, his friends, and the love and support of his grandparents.

2017 Evergreen Award, Forest of Reading — Nominated A sister. A baby. A man who watches from the trees. Fara and her husband buy a house with a disturbing history that reawakens memories of her own family tragedy. Maddy still lives in the house, once a hippie commune, where her daughter was kidnapped twenty-seven years ago. Rose grew up isolated with her mother in the backwoods north of Montreal. Now in the city, she questions the silence and deception that shaped her upbringing.

2016 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction Selection Anna has always been so level-headed, so easy-going, so talented and funny. How could anyone have guessed she wanted to die? Anna is not like other people. She’s always felt like she didn’t belong: not with other kids, not with her family, not in her body. It isn’t until her grandparents are killed in a tragic accident, however, that Anna starts to feel untethered. She begins to wonder what it would be like if she didn’t exist, and the thought of escaping the aimless drifting is the only thing that brings her comfort.

2015 Arthur Ellis Award — Nominated, Best First Novel A terrible tragedy tears a family apart. In a serene city in the extravagant mid-eighties, the privileged Warne family is victimized when their talented and artistic eleven-year-old daughter Lizbett is sexually slain. How can any family endure such horror? In an intimate exploration of grief, the surviving family members struggle with their mourning. Hildy, a loving but abused Great Dane, also in need of healing, joins the family and becomes part of their journey back to normalcy.

Judith and Antoine were lovers for a brief time. Then, suddenly, brutally, it ended. Nine years later, they meet again and attempt to revive their old passion. They dream of rewriting their history and burning the memories that are still troubling their souls. But each remains obsessed with the other’s past and the beautiful dream transforms itself little by little into a prison, a shared bout of craziness into which even the reader finds himself irresistibly drawn. Eventually, the couple’s shared madness and jealousy turns homicidal.

2014 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award — Winner On April 7, 2005, an I.E.D. blast in Afghanistan alters the course of Jeremy Merkin’s life forever. Still grieving the loss of his best friend, who was killed by the explosion, and nursing the physical and psychological wounds of the war, Jeremy returns home to find that nothing has changed, and yet everything is different. Living in the basement of a house he shares with his grandparents, mother, and mentally-challenged cousin, Henry, Jeremy smokes marijuana to combat his constant pain.

2010 BMO Winterset Award — Winner When retiree Keith O’Reilly witnesses the murder of his neighbour by a pizza delivery man one night during a snowstorm, a unique series of stories begins to unfold. As the narrative seamlessly moves from neighbour to neighbour, house to house, the reader begins to understand, not only the circumstances that led to the murder, but the private secrets and personal struggles of many of the McKay Street residents. Travelling through the changing viewpoints of a more than a dozen of people in a small residential neighbourhood in St.

Fifteen-year-old Paula’s perfectionism drives every facet of her life, from her marks in Grade 10 to the pursuit of a "perfect body." A history project brings her face to face with her grandmother’s early life and, as she delves deeper, she is disturbed to find eerie parallels between her own struggles and what she learns of the past.As Paula slowly destroys the very body she’s trying to perfect, her spirit is torn between settling for her imperfect life or entering the shadowy mystery of her grandmother’s Armenian past.