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Cyril Dabydeen’s new collection of stories, North of the Equator, looks at the polarities of tropical and temperate places. Acclaimed novelist Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners) says, "Dabydeen is in the vanguard of contemporary short-story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada." Dabydeen’s characters occupy the spaces in between. They live in limbo, stretched between two worlds: one, an adopted home in Canada; the other, a birthplace in the islands scattered across the equator.

Melanie Gordonstone, a cherubic six-year-old, was Daddy’s favourite in every way. So Margaret, her jealous 12-year-old sister, drowned her in a backyard pool. Inexperience led young Detective Bliss to attribute the girl’s death to accident, but Melanie’s mother drives herself mad believing her husband to be the killer. Margaret taunts her deranged mother for 10 years before putting her out of her misery, hanging her from a chandelier in a faked suicide.

Young Robert Pachal crosses Canada by train with his brotherinlaw’s coffin, bearing witness to a way of life that will never be seen again. When he arrives in Barry’s Bay, he unwittingly sets in motion one of the final and most tragic events in pioneer Canada.

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.

Artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors come to the Banff Centre for the Arts to work on their craft in the peaceful mountain setting. But when Alan Montrose is found dead, that peacefulness is shattered. Some even go so far as to suspect foul play was involved with the playwright's death, though most accept the fatality as merely an accident. Then, a second death occurs. Erika Dekter burns to death inside the boat studio. And this time, it is clear that it was no accident. Are the two deaths connected? If so, who wanted these two artists killed?

Hakeem Jinnah enjoys an ordinary life of working the Vancouver Tribune's crime beat, flirting with women, seeking interested investors in a mail-order-bride scheme, and driving around in his sattelite-guided Love Machine. But when he and another Tribune reporter begin competing to cover the story of a shady stock promoter's death, he finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation. This entertaining and suspenseful debut introduces us to an unforgettable lead character. Mr.

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.