NNELS Upgrade

Duncan has always been a pretty boring guy, leading a simple life while working at a bread factory. Then he stumbles upon Brenda, a sad young woman who’s about to end her life. Convinced he’s fallen in love, Duncan strikes up a desperate deal: if he can get her to laugh, she'll give life another shot, but if she doesn’t even giggle, he'll help her go through with her plan. There’s just one catch: Duncan isn’t funny. At all. So he borrows Pat, his second-favourite comedian, to help him come up with the perfect routine.

Humanity is facing extinction, and Penny Plain, elderly and blind, can only sit and wait for the end. After a heartbreaking farewell from her dog, Geoffrey, who leaves to live as a man, Penny faces the inevitable by herself. But she isn't alone for long as a cast of characters, including a serial killer, a cross-dressing banker, and talking dogs barge into her boarding house in pursuit of last chances and an escape from the hostile world outside.

When Olivia loses control at her fiftieth birthday party, her four best friends decide to intervene once and for all, much to the irritation of Olivia and her lover, Norma. But is she the only one battling a demon? Or do each of these women face an addiction of one kind or another? Five @ Fifty is a raw and darkly comedic portrayal of turning fifty in contemporary society, and of the friendships we can't live without.

Shortly after the Conservatives win a majority government in the 2011 federal election, the prime minister discovers a secret weapon in his caucus—Jisbella Lyth, a single mother with a limited understanding of her role as an MP. Using her ignorance to his advantage, the PM hatches a plan to have Jisbella front and centre in a campaign of misdirection and distraction. Humorous and clever, Proud explores the corrosive nature of the politics of division.

A furniture store owner is having an affair with the local minister's wife. The situation becomes complicated when the minister comes home unexpectedly. An intricate web of deceit is hilariously exposed as the police, members of the parish and the women's auxiliary all get involved.

When Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobiev, two Jewish biochemists, are recruited by Josef Stalin to embalm Lenin after his death, both men are pushed to their limits in preserving the former Soviet leader so that he may physically live forever. Driven by fear and fame, both men attempt to achieve the impossible, but discover a dark secret. If they should succeed the rewards will be boundless, but failure can bring only one outcome.

While there, he meets his long-lost cousin, a beautiful, young Russian woman, who sets her sights on her wealthy relative as a ticket out of the radiation-blasted country. My Chernobyl is a quirky romance set in the existential old country, where cultures and ideals clash with touching and hilarious results.

The day after their friend Cathy’s funeral, Margot, Tate, and Connie gather for a round of golf in honour of their recently departed fourth. There, they are joined by another woman, an old friend of Cathy’s they’d never met. Over the course of eighteen holes, secrets and confessions unravel as the women discuss love, sex, children, and everything in between. A funny, fast-paced, heartwarming story of friendship inspired by The Foursome.

Critically acclaimed for his international bestseller, A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurzweil has been called one of today's most gifted new voices in fiction. Now he returns with The Grand Complication -- a modern-day tale of literary intrigue, deviant passions, and delicious secrets. Behind the majestic walls of a Manhattan town house, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests unravels an 18th-century mystery -- who stole Marie Antoinette's watch. The book is a grand and complicated "timepiece," told with a devilish sense of fun.

Eve of Equality, a new feminist blog, becomes an overnight sensation when a wildly popular talk show host stumbles upon it, tweets about it, and promotes it on her show. The anonymous blog is intelligent, thoughtful, and bold, brazenly taking on various injustices in the lives of women. But it's the blogger Eve's post about the controversial entrepreneur behind XY, a new chain of high-end strip clubs opening up across the country, that sets off a firestorm.