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"I knew one thing – I wasn’t going to be rotting in that place for the rest of my life. I was getting out of there. That place turned people into the living dead. In that neighbourhood, it was hard to hear anything that didn’t carry the sound of defeat." Sixteen-year-old Porter Delaney has his future figured out, but his nice, neat plans are shaken when a man he believes may be his father suddenly appears in his Toronto neighbourhood.

First published in 1954, in Variable Winds at Jalna, the immediate sequel to Rennys Daughter, Maitland Fitzturgis and his sister, Sylvia Fleming, travel from Ireland for his official acceptance by the family as Adelines husband. Finch and Maurice also return, and Maurice brings with him his own problematic affairs of the heart. It quickly becomes one of the most fateful years that Jalna has known, and the story ends with more than one peal of the wedding bells. This is book 15 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Centenary at Jalna.

First published in 1951, in Rennys Daughter, Adeline Whiteoak is voyaging overseas. It is now 1948, and she travels with her Uncle Finch and cousin Maurice to Ireland and then London. On the ship she meets a charming Irishman and falls in love. However, when scandal breaks, she embodies her namesake and refuses to give him up. Meanwhile, back home, Jalnas peace and beauty is threatened by a neighbours speculative designs. This is book 14 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Variable Winds at Jalna.

When Alice, an elderly woman, smells the coffee her husband Jules has just made, she gets up. This ritual repeats itself every day, until one morning she finds him lifeless on the sofa in the living room — the coffee hasn’t quite finished filtering through. While Jules slowly turns into a statue that seems to be carved out of marble, Alice reminisces about earlier days and tells him things she hasn’t dared or been able to express before.

First published as Whiteoaks in 1929, in Whiteoaks of Jalna, the saga of the Whiteoak family continues, with more rivalries, tangled relationships, and secret love affairs. The colourful matriarch Adeline Whiteoak dies at 101. Each book is a complete and satisfying story in its own right, but the Jalna series has proven itself to be addictive to generations of readers around the world. This is book 8 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Finch’s Fortune.

First published in 1949, in Mary Wakefield, the third book in the Jalna series, a young English woman is hired by Ernest Whiteoak to be a governess to Philip's motherless children. When Philip falls in love with her, his mother does all she can to prevent the marriage. This is book 3 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Young Renny.

Short-listed for the 2004 Rocky Mountain Book Award and for the 2003 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award and long-listed for the 2002 CBC Canada Reads People’s Choice Book Kataryna Baliuk, a gifted fine arts student, is hoping to have a fresh start at Cawthra School for the Arts after a less-than-successful year at the neighbouring Catholic high school. But her hopes for a peaceful Grade 10 are shattered when she comes home from her first day at Cawthra and finds the RCMP interrogating her grandfather, Danylo Feschuk.

Long-listed for the 2006 Re-Lit Award for Best Novel For 15-year-old Cathy Mugan, "a place apart" is where she longs to be: apart from her mother, an unhinged, uncontrollable terror who explodes at the slightest provocation. So Cathy has a chance to work at a rectory for the summer, she seizes it. But "a place apart" is also where Cathy is: surrounded by violence, a cowering father, and a contemptuous brother, she is almost completely alone.

Taylor Colby grew up in the tiny Nova Scotia fishing village of Nickerson Harbour, but his guitar-playing skill led him to become a much sought-after studio musician in Los Angeles. Along with him went Laura, his childhood sweetheart and soulmate. In L.A., Laura becomes enamoured with the dark side of rock and roll life, leaving Taylor lost, distraught and deeply damaged.

In a Cape Breton family of black sheep, Mary is pure as the driven snow. She is patient and kind with her alcoholic grandmother and volatile mother, loyal and attentive to her spoiled cousin, and pleasant and polite all day as a grocery cashier. Her well­off aunt, the only other normal person in the family, wants to help her more, but Mary's mother is too prickly and proud.