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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.

Winner of the 2003 Ann Connor Brimer Award, short-listed for the 2004 White Pine Award Martin Emerson’s family, friends, and even his therapist have trouble figuring him out. He never showed much of a reaction to the death of his mother, and his behaviour of late has been getting more and more bizarre. And yet, his website – Emerso.com – has made him something of a cult figure to followers who believe that, if not having all the right answers, "Emerso" at least has all the right questions.

From the author of The Winter Palace comes Eve Stachniak’s first novel about the discovery of secrets and lies that stitch together empires and individual lives. Winner of the 2000 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Prize Necessary Lies tells the story of the discovery of secrets and lies that stitch together empires and individual lives. What are the lies we tell ourselves and others that get us through our lives? In the summer of 1981 Anna is suddenly offered the opportunity to study English at McGill University in Montreal.

Memoria tells the seemingly ordinary story of a woman overwhelmed by grief when her lover abandons her. The loss opens an old wound: some 20 years ago Emma’s teenage sister vanished without a trace. Soon Emma will meet another man, but the return to joy is painfully slow. Rarely has the loss of love, as well as the subtle dislocation of a family hit by tragedy, been evoked more poignantly than in this luminous novel.