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All the ingredients for a superb thriller are present in John Bishop Ballem’s tenth novel. On Manchineel, the Caribbean playground of the rich and famous, Skye MacLeod flies his own vintage airplane, attends parties, flirts with a gin-loving princess, and falls in love with the ex-wife of a powerful American senator. He comes to realize that there is something dreadfully wrong with this island paradise through a series of strange events: unusual shark attacks, voodoo ceremonies, and the disappearance of several children and young adults.

It is 1942, and 12-year-old Laura Campbell arrives in Toronto, a city bustling with the war effort and news from abroad. While looking for something to do in the grandfather’s quite neighbourhood, she meets the reclusive woman living across the street. Laura is stunned to realize she is in the presence of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the very same writer who penned her favourite novels.

It’s no secret that Sylvia is a little crazy. People have thought so ever since she first came to town when she was a teenager. But outside her own family, no one knows the depth of her mental illness. For her daughter, Mercy, Sylvia’s illness is at once a source of agony and fascination.Mercy’s mother is absent from her life on several occasions. First, she is taken away to a mental hospital for treatment. Later, on a summer night in the early 1980s, Sylvia disappears entirely, never to be seen again.

Whether we are eavesdropping on the imaginative Saturdays of a Portuguese cleaning lady or living through a divorced woman’s search for the elusive orgasm. Norma Harrs manages in this collection of short stories to absorb the essence of her narrator’s psyche with the clarity of a good actress who gets under the very skin of her characters. Love, either the absence of or yearning for, is the theme that links that stories in this collection together.

Christian Petersen beautifully reins in the confusion and displacement of a diminishing band of men facing the daily spectre of an unforgiving land, men enslaved to the grind of the sawmill, hunkered on bar stools, high in the saddle of a John Deere, or wild behind the wheel speeding down dirt roads to the Fraser. Here are fathers, brothers, lovers in search of forsaken children, bygone loves, and memories long faded in the wash of fast-running streams and firelight.

Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Translation Larry Volt is one of the rare Quebec novels that deals with the FLQ crisis. Pierre Tourangeau captures a generation of young people who are rebelling, but above all, searching.

Runner-up for the 2004 ReLit Award High fashion, higher stakes, sex, glamour, and great clothes, Stacey Schmidt gets a taste of all these when he’s suddenly propelled from suburban model hell into the garment jungle of today’s Toronto. Stacey’s part black, part white, and apparently on a fast track to fame, fortune, and all the women he could ever want, though at times it seems as if he’s standing still. But does he really want the glitz?

Winner of the 1927 Atlantic-Little, Brown Award First published in 1927, this international bestseller is now back in print. Jalna is the first book in the popular series about a Canadian family named Whiteoak, who live in southern Ontario in a red-brick house called Jalna. In Jalna, the unforgettable family makes its first appearance. Two grandsons cause tumult when they bring their brides to live at Jalna, and Grandmother Adeline celebrates her 100th birthday.

Taut, compelling, and remarkably assured, Hail Mary Corner thrusts readers into unfamiliar territory past an emotional frontier we all must cross: the uncertain ground between adolescence and adulthood.High on a cliff above a pulp-mill town on Vancouver Island, sixteen-year-old Bill MacAvoy and his friends lead cloistered lives while other boys their age run free.

Growing up, Rosie had never known any of her father's family. Why had she been chosen to inherit her grandfather's summer home, and its valuable northern waterfront land?A simple reunion with her great aunt and her cousin leads to an unexpected and chilling legacy. Failed by family and friends alike, Rosie and Will are left to solve the puzzles of Grave Deeds.