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Eve and Manny are engaged in post-civil war Israel, but Manny has a secret: he’s falling in love with his religious roots and turning his back on moral relativism. As their wedding date approaches, Manny deserts Eve, and in the midst of this betrayal Eve collides with a pre-soul, leaving her with a choice: reconcile with Manny or else condemn a soul to never living. More than a decade later, Eve has her own secret, one that may save her only son’s life or else tear her family apart.

When English Professor Marta Spëk is offered a film consultant’s contract, she’s fighting a bad case of year-end doldrums. She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity – or at the very least supply interesting material for her family’s annual Labour Day gathering.

A penetrating and unflinching examination of the modern male, Monument is told through the eyes of Seth Wilhelm, a talented young hockey player whose career is cut short by injury, sending him spiralling out of control. A failed stint at college sets the stage for a second fall from grace, a car accident which claims the life of his new girlfriend, leaving Wilhelm himself to blame.

Though But When We Look Closer is a collection of eighteen stories that approaches its subjects from a parade of landscapes, running through these tales is a singular motif—taking control. Characters find themselves in skins they wish to shed, with vices held close and with voices that must be heard. Whether it be seeking a life in a foreign land, lusting after a street junky, driving through the city with a gun or searching for buried treasure, But When We Look Closer offers a fascinating examination into the occupations and obsessions of those who walk beside us and live next door.

This is the manuscript of Xavier Bernard, an average, mundane and altogether unexceptional author who has attempted to claw back his lackluster life story by writing it himself. Free to invent the facts and improve on truth, he will stop at nothing to get the ending he desires. But when his closest friend begins to separate truth from fiction, spotting mysterious gaps and overlaps in the storyline, it becomes a race against the clock to decipher just what sort of ending Xavier plans to write.

Ben Dunn has not been trafficking marijuana to his high school students. He has, however, been intimate with one, which is probably why the authorities come looking for him one afternoon. After a night spent in the drunk-tank, Ben commissions his friend’s help in planning a revenge-plot against the fellow teacher he blames for his forced removal from the school. In the end, however, he just wants to begin anew. To have his name cleared. To fix the things he’s broken. And to go back and undo the awful things he’s done.

Rewrite, an intellectual mystery, follows Bruno Leblon, a history lecturer at a Paris university, during a six week long winter break as he tries to do research at the Public Library for his new book—a history of his family, one of the last aristocratic families in France. Bruno is shocked to find out that another library patron—“X”—is manipulating the historical evidence—late 19th century photographs of the Leblon family—that Bruno is using in his research.

Cut loose at the end of a long and violent hockey career prolonged by steroids and numbed by liquor, ex-enforcer Billy Purdy discovers that the soon-to-be-published novel of a celebrated politician’s son is in fact Billy’s father’s own, taken word for word from the original published, and promptly forgotten, some forty years before.

Ethan Reid is a 24-year-old alcoholic who spends his nights drifting between bars, drinking excessively to the point where he can no longer remember. In Toronto he meets a beautiful girl named Natalie, who forces him to question his solitary lifestyle. But when their relationship turns sour, Ethan retreats into the city's underground drug world, spiraling further out of control as old wounds begin to resurface. Set over a weekend in 2010, Seeing Red lays open an overeducated, underemployed generation struggling to reconcile expectations with reality.

Sole survivor of a suicide pact, Ang has fallen into an underground music scene obsessed with the idea of the end of the world. But when the end finally does come, Ang and her friends don’t find the liberation they expected. Instead, those still alive are starving, strung out and struggling to survive in a world that no longer makes sense. As Ang navigates the world’s final days, her emotional and physical instability mix with growing uncertainty and she begins to distrust her perception in a place where nothing can ever be trusted for what it seems to be.