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Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine’s Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson’s murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute’s patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the human psyche.

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?

In a small Ontario town, seven women gather occasionally to watch movies on video. Gilaine E. Mitchell skillfully and sensitively presents the story of each woman in a novel that speaks to several generations of women.

Thomas Wainewright - Regency fop, literary hanger-on, collector of art and artifacts, forger and deported felon - is considered one of the most notorious of English murderers. He is believed to have been one of the first recorded serial killers.James King takes on this spectral character in his first novel, Faking, and examines a number of serious questions. Was Wainewright a faker? It’s historical "fact" that he forged sketches, paintings, letters and banknotes - but, more importantly, did he fake his life?

A bartender who discovers magic on a winter night, a pair of losers taking a baking class, and a middle-aged woman who goes on a wild limo ride with the ghost of John Diefenbaker. These are a few of the amazing array of characters who live in, or near, Sharon MacFarlane’s fictional village of Palliser, a community struggling to survive in an age of rural depopulation.

Short-listed for the 1988 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award and Trillium Book Award Paris, the City of Light, was once the scene of a brilliant magnesium flare, host to the belle epoque from 1900 to 1914. Tempting poets, painters, writers, and composers from across Europe, the city relied on one man to move among them all-Guillaume Apollinaire. His contemporaries called him brilliant, mad, whimsical.

Runner-up for the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize On a stifling August day, six-year-old Clare Fraser and seven-year-old Rudy Vantwest make eye contact from opposite sides of their street. For an instant they are connected, then each turns away Clare to the shelter of the garden sprinkler, Rudy to the excitement of his brother’s impending birth. Twenty-five years later, Clare and Rudy, strangers living continents apart, fixtures of each others memories and imaginations, are connected again.

Long-listed for the 2011 ReLit Awards Andrew Christiansen, a war photographer turned cabdriver, is having a bad year. His mother has just died; his father, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gets arrested; and he’s married to a woman he doesn’t love. To make matters worse, Sarah, the gifted actress from his past, storms back into his life, bringing with her a hurricane of changes and the possibility of happiness. Keeping Andrew sane is his beloved camera through which he captures the many Torontonians who ride in his taxi.