Dundurn Press

In her new volume of verse, Bowering continues her rigorous, ambitious path and delivers poems that blend a variety of personalities, times, and places that add up to an overall substance she sees as happiness. Like an alchemist of old, she transmutes experiences, perceptions, and perspectives into something richer and rarer despite the passage of years and the loss and death they have brought.

Along the Trail in Algonquin Park has delighted thousands of readers across Canada and the United States from the time of its first publication in the summer of 1980. This is the fourth reprint of the classic work by the late legendary outdoorsman, Ralph Bice of Kearney, Ontario. The writing is vintage Ralph Bice; a combination of unequalled park knowledge, remarkable outdoor adventures and delightful rustic humour.

Along the Trail was originally to have been titled "Forty Years in Algonquin Park," but by the time the book appeared, the author's lifelong love affair with the park had exceeded eighty. In 1993, the time of Algonquin Park's centennial, the "Grand Old Man of Algonquin" had entered his 94th year. He was to continue to live nearby his beloved park until his passing in 1997. Remembered not only for his writings, Ralph Bice is honoured by a fitting memorial to "Mister Algonquin" as Algonquin Park visitors will now discover when they enter the west side of the park. For here the lake he favoured over all others, Butt Lake, has been renamed Ralph Bice Lake.

Winner of the 2004 International Gallery of Superb Printing Bronze Award for Superb Craftsmanship in Production, and the Ontario Printing and Imaging Association Excellence in Print Awards, commended for the 2004 Honourable Mention for Superb Craftsmanship in Production

From rumble seats and running broads to power tops and tailfins, 60 Years Behind the Wheel captures the thrill of motoring in Canada from the dawn of the twentieth century to 1960. There are intriguing stories of cars with no steering wheels, and fascinating photographs of historic vehicles from across the country. From the Studebaker to the Lincoln-Zephyr, from the showroom to the scrapyard, here are over 150 vehicles owned and driven by Canadians.

In this Ottawa writer's first volume of verse, there are trees, of course—catalpas on stained-glass transoms, an ever-present crabappel, nameless species in whose bare branches the winter solstice lurks. There is music, too—awhorehouse tango, a string quartet enthralling a favourite cat, the silky caress of a clarinet along the remembered flesh of adolescence. And visual art, from the Middle Ages through Matisse, is reenacted in vignettes of desire or dereliction.

Tabby Freeman and Lora Froggett go to the same school, but they live in totally opposite worlds. Tabby is rich, pretty, and the most popular girl in her class. But behind closed doors, her “perfect” life is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

On the other side, Lora is smart, timid, and the constant target of bullies. While struggling to survive the piranha-infested halls of her school, she becomes increasingly nervous that somebody might discover the unbearable truth about what’s been happening to her family.

Despite their differences, Tabby and Lora have something in common — they’re both harbouring dark secrets and a lot of pain. Although they’ve never been friends, a series of strange events causes their lives to crash together in ways neither could have ever imagined. And when the dust finally settles and all their secrets are forced out into the light, will the girls be saved … or destroyed?

Memories of farming in the 1940s conjure up images of horse-drawn farm machinery, grain stooks in fields, hay meadows, free-range chickens and cords of wood strategically placed for fuelling the kitchen range -- all before farming became the highly technical, big-time operation it is now.

Author Victor Carl Friesen was born and raised on a quarter section farm in Saskatchewan and still owns the "home place." It is there he still goes to renew his inner being. His poems, grouped into seasonal activities or observations, celebrate the rural world. Written in traditional blank verse, his poetry includes activities of yesteryear, his personal connections to rural life and his reverence for nature. Nature, as Henry David Thoreau said, is "one and continuous."

Victor Carl Friesen lives and writes in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, but photographs nature anywhere. The first recipient of the Alberta Book Award, he is the author of five books including The Year Is a Circle.

Through the inspirational, wise, and informative stories of the residents, either in their own words or based on interviews, and environmental photographs of each, this book focuses on various residents of long-term care facilities and especially on the positive facets of their life, their thoughts, and their feelings. The only issue that reaches the media about nursing homes is the negative and unfortunate events that sometimes occur, but there is so much more to the story.

Most people are afraid of long-term care homes because they recognize that it is the last phase in their life - it is the step before death. But some people have years from the time they enter the home until they die. This book shows how many men and women make the best of their situation - often leaving a positive legacy for family and friends - and how these can be fulfilling and quality years.

The home wine market has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade. The clear and well-ordered explanations in The Encyclopedia of Home Winemaking make it easy reading for the home winemaker and an essential reference guide that will be used for years.

A vandalized burial in an abandoned pioneer cemetery brings 12-year-old Peggy Henderson and her elderly archaeologist friend Eddy to Golden, British Columbia, to excavate. The town dates back to the 1880s when most of the citizens were tough and rowdy miners and railway workers who rarely died of old age. Since the wooden burial markers disintegrated long ago, Peggy and Eddy have no way of knowing the dead mans identity. But when Eddy discovers the vertebrae at the base of the skull are crushed, a sure sign the cause of death was hanging, they have their first clue.

Peggy’s tendency to make quick judgments about others leads her to the conclusion that only bad people are hanged, so the man in the burial must have gotten what he deserved. Hoping to learn more about him that proves her beliefs, she is soon digging through dusty old newspapers at the small-town museum. It’s there that Peggy learns that sometimes good people do bad things.

When the War of 1812 breaks out between the British in Canada and the United States, eighteen-year-old Billy Green is an expert woodsman with romantic ideas of combat. Struggling with his father's ideals and with his attraction to Sarah, the daughterof an American sympathizer, Billy soon finds himself faced with a series of fateful decisions.

Then on June 5, 1813, he spots the massive American forces camped in the tiny hamlet of Stoney Creek. Against all odds, the young man rides three hours in the middle of the night to Burlington Heights to warn the British. The Americans have already captured Fort George and destroyed Fort York. Burlington Heights is the only bastion of British forces remaining in the area, and if the Americans seize it, all of Upper Canada could fall under U.S. control.

Can Billy Green help save the day? The ensuing historic battle will forever change the face of a nation and present Billy with challenges that will shake him to his very core.

A brother and sister find a man entombed in ice in a Rocky Mountain glacier. Apparently he's been there for at least 50 years. Who is he? How did he get there? Where was he from? In this clever little whodunit, bestselling children's author Eric Walters joins forces with expert photographer Kevin Spreekmeester to present an unusual combination of intrigue and interaction.

In 1984, Marc Garneau became Canadas first astronaut and a national hero. Since then, seven of his fellow citizens have followed in his footsteps, many more than once. This book was written as a twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to these brave men and women who defied tremendous odds, risked their lives, and soared from Earth on sheets of flame.

Commended for the 2007 Canadian Children's Book Centre, short-listed for the 2008 Red Maple Award

"You know how it is when you get a feeling that something big is going to happen? Well, it wasn't like that for me. In fact, that Thursday started out like any other day."

With these words, Sarah Gilmore begins the remarkable story of what happened when she and her mother, Maggie, suddenly found themselves recipients of an unusual inheritance. A home of their own sounds too good to be true to the Gilmores, who have been struggling to manage on Maggie's income as a waitress - but the conditions that come with the house are strange indeed. Then Sarah receives a message that she should look for a mysterious bequest in an old chest and her imagination runs to thoughts of jewels and wealth. She is disappointed when the chest seems to yield nothing of value - until she learns the truth about her legacy.

Jim Kearns, a career manual labourer, struggles to overcome stifling cynicism brought on by missed opportunities and mid-life discord - then he loses his job for punching out a Hollywood action star in a bizarre job-site confrontation. In an effort to salvage not only Jim's sanity but also their unravelling family, his wife, Maddy, assigns him a series of life-affirming tasks to complete while he suffers through unemployment and his fifteen minutes of fame. Through the pages of his journal, we get an often humorous and sometimes touching view of one man's life journey.

At once compelling and hilarious, The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns is the most refreshing novel of the 2005.

Ex-boxer Joe Grundy is embroiled in the intrigues of his own boss, millionaire Leo Alexander, the owner of Vancouver's Lord Douglas Hotel. Somebody has murdered Leo's live-in servant and not-so-secret lover, and Grundy has to get to the bottom of the incident in order to clear the man he's forged a bond with since first coming to work for him as security for the hotel. But Leo's past serves up more surprises than Grundy bargained for.

It seems Leo has had a life full of death, jilted mistresses, spurned spouses, sharp business deals, and explosive relationships with estranged children. Another corpse pops up, Leo is arrested and jailed, and Grundy takes more hits to his body and psyche than perhaps even he can handle.

Thoughts of real and imagined death are stalking the corridors of the Lord Douglas, and Joe Grundy has to keep swinging to stay alive and remain sane.

These twelve linked stories confirm what we've suspsected all along: eventually we all outsmrat our parents. In this brilliant debut collection by Debbie Howlett we return to the turbulent 70s revisiting the bittersweet wonder years of Diane Wilkinson, a precocious teen living in suburban Montreal amidst the Catholic/Protestant, Federalist/Separatist split that foreshadowed the October Crisis. Against this backdrop of upheaval, Diane quietly chooses sides in her own domestic battles and armed with deadpan humour she protests her drunken father's hapless philandering, her uncle's half-cocked scams, her brother's dimwitted nosiness and her mother's silent acquiescence.

We Could Stay Here All Night captures the coming of age of a country as much as of a character—and hboth badly need to grow up. Diane soon comes to recognize, as we all must, that the line between adolescence and adulthood is one of convenience, and that the frantic search for love is no less desperate at 12 than it is at 40. Readers will want to curl up with these stories and stay all night.

Short-listed for the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

So you grow up as a member of the baby boom. You're well-brought up, well-educated, and your parents have great expectations. And, yet, somehow, you just don't feel you belong.

Along the way, you find the right wrong boyfriends: the poet-husband, and bane of your mother's existence, the married Japanese doctor. When love at last arrives, and the realization that it's just not in your nature to hold down a nine-to-five, stick-with-the-program corporate job, you discover that the one thing you thought would be very easy - conception - doesn't happen. Square peg in a round hole? Absolutely. But now it's called Waltzing the Tango - the humorous memoir of Gabrielle Bauer. It's a tale most women will not only identify with, but will also laugh along with - occasionally with the painful pangs of self-recognition.

First published in 1958, Centenary at Jalna brings us to 1953 when the Whiteoaks gather to mark the 100th anniversary of their estate. It has now been a century since Captain Philip and Adeline Whiteoak arrived in Canada and built their legacy. While this should be a time of festivity for the clan, tension and discontent surround the forthcoming marriage of a new generation’s Adeline and Philip, grandchildren of the originals. To make matters worse, young Dennis risks tragedy and Wakefield finds himself in a doomed relationship. As the celebrations loom closer, the question remains: Will the Whiteoaks be able to overcome their difficulties one last time? This is book 16 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles.

An artist cooks a Jamaican meal for her straying lover, thinking she might just have the one ingredient that will ensure he never leaves her. A beautiful woman slips into the sea near her Jamaican home and disappears on the eve of a reunion with her Scottish fianc∑. A white law student and a black harlot do a sexual tango in a shanty with fatal results. Like a tropical breeze, the whiff of exotica blows through the lives of Bernadette Dyer's characters, whether they are Jamaican immigrants grappling with everyday existence in Canada or residents of Jamaica itself encountering the uncommon and the fabulous under the torrid Caribbean sun. Ghosts haunt crumbling estates, lovers despair amid crashing waves and wind- whipped vistas, dislocated newcomers seek better lives in faraway lands. Magic may be found anywhere, and the wistful and the winsome walk side by side through concrete-and-steel canyons of the inner city or along cliffs where they may topple into a raging surf or collide with an epiphany of boundless possibility.

Moving with her mother from Vancouver to Wells, British Columbia, Elizabeth Connell longs for the excitement of the city and her father, brother, and friends left behind. While she is in the peaceful graveyard of nearby Barkerville she finds a small gold ring that has very special powers. By twisting the ring on her finger, Elizabeth is transported to the nineteenth century during the heyday of the gold rush. Caught between her present life with family and friends and a love in the past, Elizabeth learns more than history.

Ultimatum 2 is an action-packed, fast-moving saga. The American president is fed up with the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Russia to clean up high-level nuclear waste. His solution is to give the Russians an ultimatum: do this my way, or else! It is delivered in person by the secretary of state during a secret rendezvous in Norway.

A second ultimatum follows from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom to the government of Canada, after they decide that an international nuclear waste disposal site should be created in Canada. The Canadian prime minister tells their emissary there’s no way Canada will become a nuclear waste dump. The Americans threaten to invade. How the matter is resolved is ingenious.

While camping in Ontario's Algonquin Park with their fathers, best friends Dani and Caitlin spend the night by themselves at an isolated site on Canoe Lake, rumoured to be the favourite spot of the famous Canadian painter Tom Thomson. After a sleepless night, the girls are stunned by the appearance of a ghostly canoe drifting towards the shore. Is this really the ghost of Tom Thomson, the creator of The Jack Pine and West Wind?

Short-listed for the 2002 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel

Dr. Rebecca Temple has just returned to practice in an old converted house in the Kensington Market area of Toronto, six months after the death of her artist husband, when she's confronted with the violent murder of a patient she had earlier diagnosed as paranoid. Sylvia Warsh's accomplished first novel explores the decades-old deceptions and plots that go back to World War Two Poland and underlie the murder of Goldie. Even as Rebecca struggles with guilt over the misdiagnosis which may have led to her patient's death, she becomes the killer's next target.

Dreams vanish in most of the masterful stories that make up Norma Harrs's new collection. A young Irish girl falls in love with an older married professor and has her first date with heartache; a middle-aged woman attends her niece's wedding and drunkenly surveys the wreck of her own life and love affairs; a young woman admires her kind and beautiful neighbour so much that she is almost drawn into a not so innocent profession ...

Adversity, sometimes disaster, befalls Norma Harrs's characters, but instead of destroying these people, it often miraculously enriches their existence, bringing them a sudden awareness of what had been wrong with their lives and inspiring them to make a fresh start.

Ms. Harrs seamlessly weaves together plot and evocative detail, wildly funny turns of events and inconsolable sadness; her stories' earthy eroticism, their startlingly vivid dialogue and, above all, their breathtakingly original rendering of suffering and joy will remain with the reader long after the final page.

When 17-year-old Rigg and his friend Ari hang a marauding wolf in the wilds of medieval Greenland, they get much more than they bargained for: a hint of werewolves, glimpses of human sacrifice to the old Norse gods, and an encounter with a resourceful native girl that changes their lives forever.

This adventure brings Rigg and Ari into conflict with Rigg's grandfather, Erik the Red, the ruler of the Greenland Norse colony, and with his daughter, Freydis, skilled in black magic. Rigg must fight a mysterious warrior known only as Death Watcher and lead a dangerous expedition to rescue his father, Leif Eriksson.

Based on history and Viking beliefs and customs, Viking Terror is a striking tale of conflict between young and old, pagan and Christian, Norse settlers and Greenland natives. The skill and courage of Rigg and Ari are pitted against strong and wily adversaries, with the survival of the new Norse colony in Greenland at stake.

Rosemary Watson and Peter McAllister think their future is clear: they’re finally heading off for university. They’re thinking about finding apartments, picking courses, living like adults.

But what happens when the future becomes the past? While helping Rosemary’s brother move into an apartment in Toronto, Peter and Rosemary fall into an underground river and are swept back in time, to Toronto in 1884. It’s a struggle to survive and adapt to the alien culture of the late nineteenth century. Peter and Rosemary are forced to work together, to live together, and to become the adults they’ve only been pretending to be.

As the days stranded turn to weeks, then months, Rosemary and Peter begin to wonder if they’re really ready for a future together - and what they will do if they can’t get back.

Then someone brings them a watch, powered by a battery, made in Taiwan.

Sarah Martin is bored. Thanks to her father's transfer from an inner-city police division to a small-town detachment, she is forced to to live in Muskoka - no friends, no mall, no life.

But when Sarah does make a new friend - Mindi - life gets considerably more interesting, as the two become aware of suspicious activity surrounding Mindi's mother's boyfriend and an old barn on his property. When Sarah discovers that the barn actually holds a dozen wild black bears, she will stop at nothing to save them from their fate at the hands of an organized poaching ring. But in her efforts, she puts lives in peril.

At the dawn of the twentieth century a disparate group of travellers are thrown together in the Caucasus Mountains, fabled land of Argonauts, Amazons, and Cossacks. Henry Norman, a British Member of Parliament and author, teams up with Canadian radio pioneer and amateur archaeologist Reginald Fessenden and Katherine Waddell, the lover of Fessenden's dead friend, Ottawa poet Archibald Lampman.

Each has a question. Fessenden seeks physical confirmation of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and the Great Flood. Norman, ever the detached observer, is after material for a new book but gets more than he bargained for. Waddell pursues some elusive realm where she can find solace for her grief over Lampman and perhaps, like Fessenden, a glimpse of Paradise. Along for the carriage ride through the remote Caucasus is Pushkin-loving Sergei, a rowdy, irreverent Georgian guide and interpreter.

There are many views from Mount Tamischeira, legendary spot from which the Deluge of Deluges was first witnessed, but for this band of latter-day Argonauts, peering into one's heart may be the most challenging prospect.

Fifteen-year-old Rigg, son of Leif Eriksson, loves mystery and adventure. In the early eleventh century, he finds both of these in abundance when his father sails away and leaves him behind in Vinland, the Vikings' precarious foothold on the wild Newfoundland coast. Soon, Rigg makes an amazing discovery. The Vikings aren't alone in this alien land. But who inhabits it with them? Demons, giants, or another human tribe – one that equals the Norse invaders in skill and bravery?

Kaya and Tala, the adventurous twins, are back from their exploits in Spirit Quest on a new mission to discover why children are disappearing from one of their tribe's villages. Earth dwarves are being blamed for the missing children, but the twins are sure they're not at fault. Something very sinister is happening, so once again the sister and brother set out with Yahet (Y for short), their friend and companion, to rescue the kidnapped children. Along the way they meet a mysterious owl, a cedar ogre, demons galore, Aixos, the most ferocious of all sea serpents, and the Thunderbird himself!

Mountains, travel, adventure — Amelia Hammer wants it all. Instead, her globe-trotting parents have dumped her in tiny, boring Dunstone, Ontario, in the middle of winter with her grandmother and her geeky cousin Simon. Simon isn't having much fun either, saddled with a sulky stranger in black leather and with neon hair.And he has to be nice to her.

But life in safe little Dunstone turns dangerously exciting when Mara comes to town. Amelia is enchanted by this tall, proud, fearless girl, but Simon worries that Mara might be mixed up in something weird. He’s right. Mara is not what she seems, and neither is the shape-shifting assassin who’s tracking her. When the cousins take Mara's side in a war for an alien world, Amelia has to spread her wings — literally — and Simon must find out how far he will go to save a cousin who has become a friend.

Nick Slovak is put in charge of a hot immigration investigation when he learns that his partner, immigration officer Walter Martin, is dead and the killer has escaped. Nick's investigation turns up a trail of unsavoury evidence: organized crime, a billion dollar smuggling operation, and government corruption at the highest levels. As his world is turned upside down, he is forced to confront the painful truth about Grace Wang-Weinstein, the woman he loves.

Grace, a brilliant young immigration judge, finds herself a suspect in the murder investigation. At the same time, she is handed the biggest case of her career, and pitched into a web of intrigue. Caught between her political masters, the police and the cold-eyed killers of an immigration officer, she must confront the past in order to unravel the truth - that one of her friends is not what he seems to be.

Architect and single mother Emily Harada has structured a well-ordered existence around her work restoring historic houses and the parenting of her teenage son, Jesse. But her carefully laid foundation cracks when she develops a nagging ache in her shoulder, has her architectural integrity questioned, and feels shut out by Jesse's assertions of independence. What she doesn't need right now - or does she? - are the romantic attentions of a former student, an attractive but much younger man. Or for an old acquaintance to resurface with questions about a Bronze Age artifact that Emily might have, uh, stolen, once upon a time, in her youth.

Emily, her son, and the 2,000-year-old artifact all come of age in this funny and moving novel about motherhood, middle age, and one woman's attempt to restore herself to a state of grace that combines the best elements of past and present, old and new.

Rosemary Watson lives in the small town of Clarksbury, where news travels fast and gossip sticks around. Years before, her brother Theo suffered a nervous breakdown, and Rosemary, now entering junior high, is constantly teased about it. She wonders if she might go crazy like her brother, and she feels guilty for not being able to save him. She tries to hide in books, but even there she’s uneasy: she can’t stand to see characters suffer. She’s happiest in the cool world of fact and figures.

Rosemary and Peter - the new kid in school with issues of his own - are thrown together, and soon find themselves on a life-or-death quest to rescue Rosemary’s brother, who has lost himself in a book. With the help of Peter and her guide, faerie shape-shifter Puck, Rosemary must face the storybook perils of the Land of Fiction and learn to open her heart, before it is too late.

First published in 1933, The Master of Jalna is Renny Whiteoak, who owns the old house and property. After the death of Grandmother Adeline, Renny attempts to carry on the family tradition. He and his wife Alayne have a daughter named Adeline, who has inherited her namesake's red hair, strong will, and fierce temper. While Alayne is preoccupied trying to tame this wild, red-headed child, Renny has a love affair with Claire, the widow of his best friend. The whole Whiteoak family is back at Jalna, and Renny looks after everyone, including Claire and her daughter. He faces a financial crisis and struggles to keep the estate intact. This is book 10 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Whiteoak Harvest.

Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General's Award for Translation (French to English)

Confident, hardworking, and practical, architect Anne Martin is living the good life in Montreal. Yet one day, high up in her apartment overlooking the city and the river, at the heart of her perfectly controlled universe, Anne witnesses a scene that causes a crack to appear in her life, a crack that slowly widens and eventually threatens her very existence.

At this time of lost certainty, Anne's work takes her to Tunis. Here, among the ruins of Carthage, she meets Alessandro Moretti, an Italian archaeologist who is her senior by nearly twenty years and affects her as no one ever has. A struggle ensues, between love and jealousy, love and the fear of abandonment, love and other, even deeper fears. Anne gradually faces her demons the buried sorrow of a child of a broken family, the bewilderment caused by a mysterious family tragedy.

A story of three Buddhist monks based on a traditional Chinese folk tale about cooperation.

Without cooperation, one monk can fetch two buckets of water, two monks will only be able to fetch one bucket of water, and three monks will fetch no water at all.

Sarah Martin isn't the only outsider in her small Muskoka town. But when she's teamed up with Byron Hopper for a geometry project, she discovers that she's had an easier time being accepted in her new town than some long-time residents.

Byron's family has long been the subject of rumours. Some say that they are a mob family, some say they are part of a witness relocation program, some say they are just plain weird. But the most sinister rumour surrounds Byron's sister, Garnet, who many believed committed murder.

Sarah resolves to get closer to Byron to find out more about his family ... and get to the bottom of the alleged murder. In so doing, she learns that the family has another secret: they're Wiccans. As Sarah learns more about the family, she also cuts through popular misconceptions about Wicca and finds out what Wiccans believe, how they worship, and what values they hold dear.

In The Ruby Kingdom, readers were captivated as Amelia Hammer and her cousin, Simon, and friend, Ike, discovered a secret gate leading from the small, southern-Ontario town of Dunstone to the extraordinary land of Mythrin - a world populated by dragons. Now, dragon leader, Mara, seeks the help of Amelia and her friends again. This time, a peculiar race of humans from a world called Cassar is searching for the Prism Blade - a legendary weapon forged at the beginning of time. Both the dragons and the Casseri seek the Prism Blade for their own protection; both the dragons and the Casseri fear the Blade falling into each others' hands.

Caught in the middle, Amelia, Simon, and Ike are also caught by surprise when they discover that the Prism Blade has been hidden for centuries in their own town ... and is one of the most treasured objects in all of Dunstone.

"Beneath the deadly dull history of Ontario lies a myriad of fascinating, but little-known stories. Did you know:

• Sir John A. Macdonald was born in an Ontario town, not in Scotland?
• Karl Marx was once a visitor to Toronto?
• The famous poet W.B. Yeats graced the town of Captainstone, Ontario, with a visit in 1933?
• There was an active volcano in Ontario in 1886?

"The book is accompanied by an important caveat: All of these stories are fictitious.

"'The book is rather hard to characterize,' said MacGillivary, a professor at the University of Waterloo. 'It doesn't fit into any particular genre. It is best described as a "myth imitation." What I am doing here is inventing myths about the history of Ontario, where the facts are almost entirely false but the emotions are real.'

"The book, a humorous romp through the history of Ontario, distills the character of Ontario out of the approximately 120 short vignettes taken, supposedly, from local histories and reminiscences, all of which are fictitious."
- Anne Marie Goetz, Whig-Standard Staff Writer

Fifteen-year-old Garnet Walcott is lonely and has a hard time making new friends when she moves to Kitchener, Ontario. Her mother, already preoccupied with work, has begun a search for a father she never knew. By chance, Garnet meets and befriends Elizabeth Tate, an elderly widow who tells Garnet that a priceless set of heirloom jewels dating back to Russian nobility may be hidden in her Victorian home. Elizabeth shows Garnet an intriguing portrait of her late mother-in-law, Sofia Tate, wearing sapphires and diamonds.

Garnet is introduced to Dan Peters, one of the most popular boys at school, and when Elizabeth suffers a heart attack, Garnet persuades him to help her find the jewels for Elizabeth. Do the jewels really exist? Garnet believes they do, and drawing on that faith, she follows the clues left by Elizabeth's late eccentric, religious father-in-law and discovers much more than she bargained for.

Short-listed for the 2004 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel

After her marriage breaks down, shy schoolteacher Blithe Morrison takes refuge for the summer with her parents in the affluent Toronto neighbourhood of Rose Park. Blithe's return home evokes memories of her lifelong sibling war with Noel, her golden-boy older brother, now a diplomat posted in England. But when Blithe befriends a lonely 11-year-old girl and takes on a local history project, she uncovers truths about a long-rumoured buried treasure that forever alter her perceptions of her family, her friends, and herself.

Historic homes, ravines, and family secrets all figure in The Glenwood Treasure, a curl-up-and-enjoy novel that updates the traditions of such suspense classics as Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar and Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca.

Joe Barley, full-time English professor and part-time private detective, is given a simple case: to track Jason Tyler and find proof of his adultery. But as he's investigating, Barley stumbles across the story of a missing manuscript containing writings by a young Ernest Hemingway.

What is Tyler's connection to the Hemingway papers? And why does Tyler's wife insist that Barley stay on the case, long after he's come up with the required evidence of Tyler's infidelity?

While these questions hang over Barley, his own life is complicated by academic politics, and challenges to his monogamous relationship with his longtime partner, Carole.

Set in Toronto, The Hemingway Caper is the second book in the Joe Barley series. The first, The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn, won the prestigious Barry Award.

Long-listed for the 2006 Re-Lit Award for Best Novel

Grant McRae has a loving wife, a healthy son, and a new career with the local police department. Bert Commerford has a pretty good life too, as the proud owner of Commerford & Sons Auto Service. But Bert's sons are polar opposites: Travis is a budding junior hockey star, and Russell is a thug loaded with resentment for Bert. When tragedy befalls the Commerfords, Bert finds himself too haunted by his murky past to stop his life from buckling. Russell leaves home and almost immediately finds disaster as his path intersects with Constable McRae's.

Told from alternating perspectives, The Next Rainy Day is a fast-moving exploration of loss and of finding hope in the wake of personal disaster.

Short-listed for the 1990 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award

Moving to Soda Creek, a former Gold Rush boomtown in the Cariboo region of interior British Columbia, Kelly Linden and her father try to begin their lives again after a tragic family accident.

Run by Karen Morton, the eccentric, sex-fantasy-prone mother in a hilarious yet deeply troubled dysfunctional family in North Vancouver, the Footstop Cafe is a place to put your feet up near the beautiful but tragedy-plagued Lynn Canyon and its vertigo-inspiring footbridge. The canyon and the cafe serve as the nexus around which Karen's universe revolves. Things happen here. Amazing things.

Karen's husband is a podiatrist with a foot fetish, her teenage daughter thinks she's a lesbian but is afraid to confront the reality, and her younger son is given to having bowel movements in closets and building bombs. Throw in Karen's unconventional Anglican minister father and his Tibetan wife, a hairy belly dancer named Moey, a randy virgin high school diver with Olympic ambitions, and a host of other quirky, unforgettable characters and you have a debut novel that is at turns absurdist, touching, manic, and supremely irreverent.

In The Fish Kisser, a megalomaniac becomes determined to exact revenge on the Western world through a devious plot of global cyber-warfare. He enlists his own agents to track down and kidnap the experts and educated elite that can help him accomplish the unthinkable. With a series of staged deaths and disappearances, he sets his plan in motion.

When the hired henchmen target Roger LeClarc, an English computer expert with a dark secret of his own, the hunters become the hunted. English detective David Bliss, who chased and was chased around the English countryside in Missing: Presumed Dead, teams up with Dutch detective Yolanda Pieters to solve this improbable affair. Fighting internal politics, stumbling upon government cover-ups, and even battling Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, together they chase a trail of blood, intrigue, and romance across Europe to Iraq in a desperate search for the kidnapped specialists. Fans of the David Bliss character will not be disappointed as James Hawkins turns the action up several notches.

When Anna and Sadie discover the diaries of their mother, Rebecca, in the days following her death, they learn that her life was far more complex than either of them knew: a garment worker in early-1900s New York; the reluctant wife in an arranged marriage to an ailing and abusive husband; the improbable friend of a pregnant prostitute.

But the diaries reveal more than just surprising details about Rebecca's life: they also point to a family secret - and questions about Sadie's true parentage.

The Featherbed is a gripping family saga that moves between the tenements of New York's Lower East Side and the stately homes of Toronto's Annex. Strong in plot, character, setting, and style, it is a fully-realised debut from an assured writer.

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.

Father Pat Cheyne, an unkempt, middle-aged priest on a lone canoe ride reflects on how these solitary meditations in his beloved canoe have marked his life. His thoughts reach back to his boyhood rejection of the boisterous ways of his father, just home from the war, to the memorable evening when he first prayed, eyes open, floating in a silent magic space with stars drenching the sky above and mirror lake below him. Even now, the canoe remains his own vehicle for understanding solitude.

The Father Pat Stories chronicle the Anglican priest and former member of Parliament's pattern of engagement and disengagement as he very actively applies tolerance and forgiveness to his parishioner's difficulties in a world where religion often stands for intolerance and exclusion. The fast paced adventures engage a tight trio of friends Father Pat, his public relations pal, Terry, and their mutual big city reporter friend, Deirdre. The odd trio get all too intimately involved with each other and in problems, personal and institutional in Ridgewood, Father Pat's suburban parish.The yarns, almost parables, present a good man through a lifetime of friendships and loves.

Jessica March is back, sleuthing in Parkdale. She's on the trail of an extortionist whose known victims are young refugee women students at her school. If the extortionist's victims refuse his demands for money he hurts them, or he shows them the doll. No one who has seen it is unaffected, and no one will explain its power.

Jess and a group of female students are chosen to find out if there are other victims, too traumatized to complain. But the group is almost paralyzed by problems of its own: hot disagreements, personality clashes, jealousies, and worst of all, the possibility of an infiltrator. Someone (wittingly or unwittingly) is warning the extortionist. He evades every potential trap.

Jess's "sort-of" boyfriend is also giving her trouble. Excluded from the hunt for the extortionist, Jon feels discriminated against. Jess tries to placate him, but in doing so wonders if she's telling him too much. She wonders if he's passing the information on to his friends, including the very attractive and likeable Anthony, who almost fits the description of the extortionist. Or does he?

A classic of Canadian erotica, this is the original restored edition of the flagellation story Glassco crafted for the notorious Paris publisher Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press.

Short-listed for the 1997 Canadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice

On the run from the authorities and the angry townspeople of Weasel City, British Columbia, in the early 1940s, teenage Loretta and her younger brother, Teddy, travel with their gambling stepfather, "Bean-Trap" Braden, as he strikes out in search of a good poker game in the Canadian and American West.

Loretta and Teddy try to adjust to life on the run as they shuttle from ghost town to ghost town, jumping borders and stowing away on trucks, sleds, and trains. As the children make friends in places like Butte, Montana; Spokane, Washington; and Ferguson, British Columbia, Bean-Trap creates enemies wherever they go. Loretta and Teddy try to persuade their father to keep on the straight and narrow, but instead Bean-Trap schemes to stay one step ahead of all the sore losers who are right behind him and hot on the trail of his gold.

Short-listed for the 1999 Sheila A. Egoff Award for Children’s Literature and Geoffrey Bilson Award

Ann Walsh’s sequel to Moses, Me and Murder (Pacific Educational Press) continues the adventures of Ted, now 14. Still tormented by the ghost of murderer James barry, Ted apprentices to the eccentric doctor J.B. Wilkinson, whose dependency on opium for his patients and for his own demons reveals a past intertwined with the life and death of an enigmatic woman named sophia Cameron.

Like any young man, Etienne longs for independence and dreams about a bright future. But he's a Tourangeau, part of a sprawling Quebec family that, though destitute, thrives as insecurely as weeds in a well-tended garden, nurtured by a mother whose abundant love is more than maternal. Then he meets Odile, a beautiful young woman from a good family who inspires Etienne to transform his future into something worthy of her. But, like Romeo and Juliet, their wild, pure love for each other cannot last. Though Etienne faces his challenges courageously, destiny will force the young lovers apart.

First published in 1944, The Building of Jalna is one of sixteen books in the Jalna series written by Canada’s Mazo de la Roche. In The Building of Jalna, Adeline, an impulsive bride with an Irish temper, and her husband, Captain Whiteoak, select Lake Ontario as the site of their new home. De la Roche chronicles their trials and tribulations during the building of the house, the swimming and skating parties, and the jealousies and humourous events that arise. This is book 1 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Morning at Jalna.

Where is reality to be found: at the surface of things or behind it?

Max Willem, a young art student in Montreal at the end of the 1960s, becomes obsessed with outward appearances - with makeup, costume, and masks of all kinds. For him, outward reality, and in particular that of the opposite sex, is composed of many veils of illusion and artifice through which he must see if he is to feel fully alive. At the same time, Max discovers his exceptional talent for art forgery. Moving to New York, he becomes a tool in the hands of a powerful international ring dealing in forged art, and suffers from the loss of his own artistic integrity. Himself seduced as much a seducer, how can Max escape and redeem his artistic soul?

In The Art of Deception, Sergio Kokis has written a novel about mystification and illusion. His exuberant narrative provides a caustic insight into the undersides of art and of love.

A hilarious fairytale for adults facing a complicated world.

In the legend-steeped Borders region of Scotland, a writer discovers the hidden past of the man she loves and the truth of her mother’s teachings.

Short-listed for the 2001 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Prize

Lilith Boot's life changes forever the night she drowns the flowers in her parents' garden. Frightened by their daughter's odd behaviour, and her recent pronouncements of psychic visions, the Boots send Lilith to a Vancouver mental hospital. It is there that she becomes pregnant, giving birth after her discharge.

Years later, Lilith uses her visions to help Toronto police find missing children. At the same time, her own daughter, Lemon, struggles to distinguish herself from her quirky mother. Searching for her identity, she sets off across the country in search of the father she has never met. In the process, both Lilith and Lemon discover that they can never escape from the past - or each other.

This debut novel introduces an astonishing new voice to the Canadian literary scene. With fresh, inspiring language, and characters who steal your heart, Elizabeth Ruth weaves together an unforgettable story of loss and landscape of memory.

The day Pauline sees Ramona's mug shot in the paper, she knows she's going to be called upon to relive the darkest period of her life. Charged with murder, Ramona and her husband, Jim, have also been accused of sexually abusing female victims for years in their home. And when the police discover a stash of scripts for disturbing plays performed years earlier by Pauline, Ramona, and Jim, Pauline becomes a key witness in the trial.

Tell Everything follows Pauline as she prepares for her testimony, and in the process reawakens memories that she has buried since she was a teenager. But the most difficult challenge she faces is keeping her relationship with her partner, Alex, in tact as he learns for the first time what terrible secrets lurk in her past. Tell Everything is a gripping, agonizingly vivid work from a gifted author who is not afraid to take her reader into the darkest regions of the human soul.

The year is 1927, and the Merril children are once again in school – but one that's unlike any other. For 10 months out of the year their school, set up in a Northern Ontario railway care that also serves as their home, is on the move. Theirteen-year-old Jenny Merrill loves life on the tracks, but she has a secret wish. She's fallen in love with a violin on page 244 of the Eaton's catalogue. But how will she get the money to pay for it?

For Joe Shoe, the return to his family home in north Toronto is more than just a trip down memory lane; it's also a visit to a crime scene. No sooner has Shoe arrived in his old neighbourhood than he discovers that police are investigating a murder in the ravine near his home. And the murder victim is a man who lived in the neighbourhood 35 years earlier — and who moved away while still a suspect in a series of rapes that occurred in the very ravine in which he was ultimately murdered.

The police investigation, and Shoe's own inquiries, becomes intensely personal, as old friends, girlfriends, and even family members seem to have a connection to the murder victim, and reasons to want him dead. Compelling, deeply emotional, and at times even disturbing, The Dells is an accomplished novel by one of Canada's rising stars of crime fiction.

Joe Grundy is an ex-heavyweight boxer whose main claim to fame was that he got knocked out by champ Evander Holyfield. Now he's chief of security for a posh old hotel, the Lord Douglas, in downtown Vancouver, and life is pretty good. But then a young neo-hippie inherits more than half a billion dollars and decides to give it all away. As soon as the kid checks into the Lord Douglas with the intention of holding a press conference to announce the scheme, Joe knows big trouble is headed his way, especially when the kid winds up dead.

Grundy sets out to discover who murdered the would-be philanthropist only to collide with suspects and sucker punches around every corner. Joe had some pretty tough battles during his days in the ring, but this time the stakes are higher, the opponents are lethal, and the final count could be fatal.

"No one pays much attention to you if you don't have much to say, so there was no way I could have predicted what would happen when I stopped talking altogether."

When his teacher announces that it's time for the yearly class speeches, Griffin Maxwell starts to sweat. His past experience with the dreaded speech was humiliating, to say the least, and he just knows there's no way he can go through that again. So Griffin's best friend, Bryan, comes up with a solution -- one that's so simple it just has to work. But neither boy can begin to predict the bizarre chain of events that will be set in place when Griffin goes along with the idea.

From squaring off with the school bully to reading a teacher's private letters, Griffin Maxwell wil have to face things he never imagined, and all without saying a word!

Short-listed for the Chocolate Lily Book Award, 2005

It's summer 1950, and for 11-year-old French Canadian Sophie LaGrange, Camp Latona on British Columbia's Gambier Island promises to be pure bliss. But then Sophie has to buddy up with a strange, unfriendly Jewish refugee girl named Ginette and things go sour. Soon Sophie learns that Ginette has her own secrets and anxieties, worries that explain the girl's seemly bizarre behaviour.

Sheila Peters makes her impressive fiction debut with a collection of loosely linked stories whose characters, whether they live in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Prairies, are ordinary men and women who have seemingly everyday experiences that glimmer with the extraordinary. Her spare, stripped-down prose, leavened with sly humour and a gift for poetic resonance, reminds one of the work of Alice Munro or Sandra Birdsell.

Peters creates people who often feel out of sync with the spiritual, emotional, and physical environments they find themselves in. Two old people on a farm try to comprehend the inevitable fate befalling them, all the while contemplating the strange goings-on of neighbours. A young woman on the lam from Texas finds herself beached in the Queen Charlottes on her way to Alaska. A punked-up Vancouver girl accompanies a crusty grandmother on a tense hunting trek in the drizzly woods. Their universe is our universe, but with a twist that makes it refreshingly new and decidedly different.

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.

Shoulder the Sky is a rarity among young adult novels - it challenges the reader with philosophical thought and complex observations.

Short-listed for the 2005 CLA Young Adult Canadian Book Award

Sixteen-year-old Simon has always been considered odd. Three years ago, a skateboarding accident caused some minor brain damage and made him a little stranger. His career-driven parents mostly leave him alone, and he spends much of his time living in his imagination. When Andrea, whom no one else can see, appears to Simon in class, he is fascinated by her and strikes up a friendship, even though he knows she may be pure hallucination - he's had imaginary friends before. Andrea says she is there to "help" him, but before the story ends, Simon discovers that it is he who needs to help Andrea, not the other way around.

Eleven-year-old Josie Grun escapes from Communist East Germany with her mother and father one dark night in 1989 just months before the Berlin Wall comes tumbling down. Braving border guards, barbed wire, and rifle shots, Josie reluctantly turns her back on her best friend, Greta, and all that was once familiar. She crosses the ocean to join her uncle in Calgary, attempts to learn a foreign language, and overcomes the prejudices of her schoolmates in order to forge a new life. Clinging to the passion that has always been a comfort, her figure skating, she enters a local competition to prove that she is free on the ice and off.

This psychological mystery introduces David Morgan and Miranda Quin, two maverick and culturally sophisticated Toronto police detectives. When a man is found dead in a garden pond in the wealthy heart of Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood Morgan is lead into speculations about Japanese ornamental koi fish, and Quin into a chilling sequence of revelations that could destroy her. But the real mystery begins not with the deceased but with a woman who walks onto the crime scene and without emotion declares herself to be the victim's mistress. From that point on everything changes, even the past.

Short-listed for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada Region

A man of innate taste and discrimination, Edward has become an art dealer and collector of fine antiques and paintings. During his first six idyllic years he was the centre and focus of his mother's existence. Betrayals and unhappiness in subsequent years have led him to form almost fetishistic attachments to beautiful objects, as a substitute for the human relationships that have invariably failed him.

Now in his late forties, on a holiday in Sicily, Edward falls deeply in love with a young English-Italian artist, but he has not yet learned that there is a difference between loving and possessing.

For Sylvie, Ragged Island - and the whales who swam around it - is the only world she has ever known. It is the place where she was born and raised, where she lived with her four late husbands, and where she plans to live out her remaining years.

It is also the home to a community whose love for the island is immense. But when the Nova Scotia government decides to shut down the ferry service that is the lifeblood of Ragged Island, the residents see their world beginning to disappear.

Sea of Tranquility is the lyrical and moving story of an island struggling to survive. Lesley Choyce's seventh novel, it contains the elements for which the author is known: engaging characters, page-turning storyline, and uproarious humour. Choyce is in top form.

Winner of the British Columbia Year 2000 Book Award

Star Girl is a pint-sized superhero with gigantic appeal for 10-year-old Sophie, a French Canadian girl about to make a cross-Canada move with her family. In 1949, the year Newfoundland joins Confederation, Sophie soars over flooded prairies, dinosaur badlands, and the peaks of the Rockies. Each chapter is a snapshot of provincial history and an adventure in which she flies her cape, and the flag, in the name of Stars everywhere!

Thirteen-year-old Darrell Connor is a troubled girl, still haunted by the motorcycle accident that took her father's life and part of her leg three years ago. She is not pleased when her worried mother sends her to board at Eagle Glen School for the summer.

But there is a sense of mystery at the school that appeals to Darrell, and as she investigates, she finds adventure and begins to form a few tentative friendships. When she stumbles upon a passage through time, she begins to wonder - is it possible to change her own past?

Short-listed for the 2004 Chocolate Lily Book Award

Darrell Connor is back for another term at Eagle Glen, but is shocked to find that along with her friends Brodie and Kate, her nemesis, Conrad Kennedy, has enrolled at the school.

The memory of her recent visit to medieval Scotland is still fresh, and when Darrell and her dog, Delaney, investigate an abandoned lighthouse, they discover another route into the past. Lost in the magical beauty of Renaissance Italy, Darrell meets a young artist with fiery ambition named Leonardo Da Vinci.

Does Leonardo hold the key to resolving the tragedy of her own past? Ignoring the advice of a kindly stranger, Darrell embarks on a desperate journey to find the answers to her own fears, unaware of the price she and her friends will pay for dancing with time.

Short-listed for the 2003 Red Maple Award and Arthur Ellis Award for best Juvenile Book, commended for the 2003 Canadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice Selection

Shelby Belgarden isn't exactly thrilled when people start thinking Greg is her boyfriend. After all, she's more interested in the athletic Nick Jarvis. But one day Greg suddenly becomes more interesting to Shelby – though for all the wrong reasons: Shelby begins to suspect that Greg is responsible for the series of arsons that have occurred in her small New Brunswick town in recent weeks. After finding out that Greg and his father had moved to this town after their old home burnt down – with Greg's mother inside – Shelby finds Greg's gasoline-soaked mitten near the scene of the latest arson.

Shelby launches her own investigation into the crimes. As she does, she becomes aware that whoever is responsible may have been a victim of sexual abuse.

A translator, fed up with translating paperback romances, undertakes the translation of the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer, Leonard Ming. She travels from Canada to Spain to do her work, encountering love — and death — in the seaside Andalusian town of Almunecar.

After the success of Seeds of Time and Secret of Light, kc dyer returns with Shades of Red, the final instalment in the Eagle Glen Trilogy.

Darrell is back in the twenty-first century and back at Eagle Glen school. But her last trip through time was disastrous: her arch-enemy, Conrad Kennedy, slipped through with Darrell and her friends ... and apparently met his demise. But when the gang travels to the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Darrell discovers that Conrad may have survived. Her quest to right a wrong takes her to England during the reign of Henry VIII, where she becomes a confidant of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. With lives in peril, the story dramatically concludes at the Tower of London.

The year is 1893, the place is Chicago, and the most fabulous fairthe Earth has ever seen becomes an unusual home for a young Labrador Inuit boy dubbed Pomiuk, Prince of the North, who captures the hearts of the millions of people who click through the turnstiles to see Eskimo Village, one of dozens of living cultures showcased at the exhibition. Just as he did so long ago, Pomiuk's adventures will once again charm and enthrall all those who come his way.

Novelist and poet Claude Le Bouthillier draws on his Acadian and New Brunswick heritage to create Phantom Ships. First published in 1989 as Le Feu du Mauvais Temps, it gives an account of the end of the French Empire in Canada as experienced by the author’s own ancestor, Joseph Le Bouthillier.

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.

In 1993, a group of five Kingston women--T. Anne Archer, Mary Cavanagh, Elizabeth Greene, Tara Kainer, Janice Kirk--began to compile ananthology about Canada at the point where one millennium becomes another. As the newly-formed Foxglove Collective, they solicited manuscripts that reflected origins (how the past shapes the present), life at the end of this century, and projections past the year 2000. They envisioned a book that wove together established, emerging, and previously unpublished voices from the Yukon to the Maritimes: that book is On the Threshold: Writing Toward the Year 2000.

No millennium library would be complete without a copy of this timely and unique collection of literary musings by some of the nation's best. A wonderful weave of poetry and prose, this anthology reflects on moments both private and public, personal and political, which have formed the crucible for life in the twenty-first century as we know it. Tasked with commenting both on the century that lay behind and the century that beckons, each author fashioned a piece exemplary of the crises, successes and transformations inherent in an arc spanning more than a hundred years of nation-building and social upheaval. Whether unabashedly optimistic or unapologetically critical, these writers make their peace with the past while invoking the future.

Short-listed for the 2005 Snow Willow Award and for the 2006 Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award

Cole Fennety doesn't know it, but he is about to have the strangest summer of his life. His little sister, Jessie, is driving him crazy, his mother is too wrapped up in the world of daytime soaps to intervene, and his best friend, Wayne, is out of control. Worst of all, his boss, Sam Kerrigan, is the meanest man in town. But beneath Sam's crusty exterior lies a kind heart -- as well as a terrible secret that forces Cole to face questions to which there are no easy answers.

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. Now, frightened for his own safety, Margaret's father sends her to live in a remote Canadian community where he believes she can do no further damage - big mistake!

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.

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? These are the questions that aspiring painter Laura Janeway grapples with as she launches her own investigation of the crimes. One thing is certain: to find out who is responsible for the deaths, Janeway must be suspicious of everyone in the closely knit artists' colony. And with grudges, professional jealousies, and affairs hanging in the air, there are more than enough suspects.

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.

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. In Memoria's multi-layered narrative, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the slow reconstruction of Emma's outer and inner world, a world of dizzying sensuality, deep sadness, bewitchingly beautiful images, and, ultimately, "the small circle of new beginnings."

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. Jinnah, a politically incorrect but resourceful reporter, proves to be a wily and relentless investigator. Hindered in his pursuits by the police department, Mr. Jinnah searches out the truth in an increasingly bizarre investigation. Meanwhile, he and his cousin seek their fortune in a scheme to marry Russian peasant women to wealthy Chinese men.

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. A historian, she is trying to complete her own research into the death of Shawnadithit, a Beothuk Indian woman who was the last survivor of a Newfoundland tribe that was exterminated by settlers in the 1820s. But Ondine's ability to cope in the modern world is crippled by a repressed memory of violence as a witness to the Montreal Massacre in 1989 when fourteen women were slain in Canada's most shocking mass murder. Moody and macabre, Steven Manners's expressionist novel is a literary tour de force that lurches through the dementia of the twentieth century, seeking meaning behind the massacres and mayhem.

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. Her absence is pivotal in Mercy's life.

Populated by an array of compelling characters the mad mother, the lovelorn father, the crossdressing younger brother, the quirky grandmother Love Object is a gripping account of the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in rural Ontario in the 1980s.

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.

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.

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. Love for a family member, a friend, a lover, or a husband, and sometimes that lack of reciprocity, is the element that gives the stories poignancy and force.

The variety in these stories keeps the reader always guessing. The author doesn’t limit us to the easy answers, but brilliantly provokes us to enlarge our own landscape.

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. She jumps at the chance, leaving behind her job, her husband, and her country – Poland. She meets William, a music professor, and falls in love. Back home, martial law is declared. After almost ten years of marriage, William dies suddenly of a heart attack, and Anna is left to pick up the pieces. In the midst of grieving, she discovers more pieces than expected: for the length of their lives together, William carried on a long-distance affair with a woman journalist in Germany.

In search of truth, Anna returns to a dramatically changed Europe, where Communism has fallen, the Berlin Wall has been torn down, and where, once again, history will have to be rewritten. Probing the depths of betrayal and forgiveness, she confronts her own past and the motives that drove her away from Poland; she sees herself through the eyes of her mother, her ex-husband, and most importantly, William's German lover, Ursula.