A NATIONAL BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEA young, enigmatic woman—Lily Azerov—arrives in post-war Montreal expecting to meet her betrothed, Sol Kramer. When Sol sees Lily at the train station, however, he turns her down. His brother, Nathan, sees Lily and instantly decides to marry her.But Lily is not who she claims to be, and her attempt to live a quiet life as Nathan Kramer’s wife shatters when she disappears, leaving her baby daughter with ...

Paris, 1878. Following the death of their father from overwork, the three van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without their father's wages, and with what little their mother earns as a laundress disappearing down the absinthe bottle, eviction from their single boarding room seems imminent. With few options for work available for a girl, bookish fourteen-year-old Marie and her younger sister Charlotte are dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seven francs a week, the gi...

The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.Weaving together the story of an escaped slave in the pre–Civil War South and a determined junior lawyer, The House Girl follows Lina Sparrow as she looks for an appropriate lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking compensation for families of slaves. In her research, she learns about Lu Anne Be...

A critically acclaimed, award-winning author, Alix Ohlin pens a masterpiece of emotional complexity with Inside. In this literary tour de force, a therapist named Grace attempts to help a man recover from his failed suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Grace's teen patient Annie runs away from home to reinvent herself in New York, and Grace's ex-husband leaves the comfort of a successful relationship to attempt to help native peoples in the bleak Arctic. ''A skillful storyteller attractively quick-...

Will Ferguson takes readers deep into the labyrinth of lies that is " 419," winner of the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. A car tumbles through darkness down a snowy ravine. A woman without a name walks out of a dust storm in sub-Saharan Africa. And in the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the Internet, looking for victims. Lives intersect. Worlds collide. And it all begins with a single email: " Dear Sir, I am the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help" Wh...

Hannah Levi is renowned throughout Venice for her gift at coaxing reluctant babies from their mothers-- a gift aided by the secret " birthing spoons" she designed. But when a count implores her to attend to his wife, who has been laboring for days to give birth to their firstborn son, Hannah is torn. A Papal edict forbids Jews from rendering medical treatment to Christians, but the payment he offers is enough to ransom her beloved husband, Isaac, who has been captured at sea. Can Hannah re...

In this provocative and starkly beautiful historical novel, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where slaves are the only available workers and where the family' s values and beliefs are sorely tested. In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, recently widowed and shunned by his fellow Quakers when he marries his young servant girl to help with his five small children, moves his shaken family down the Wilderness Road to the Virginia/Kentucky border. Although determined to ho...

Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeIn 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twenty-five years later, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

A novel about what happens when we view our neighbours as “The Other” and the transformative power of unlikely friendships, Our Daily Bread is inspired by the true story of the Goler Clan of Nova Scotia.The Erskine Clan, long shunned by the people of Gideon, live in secrecy and isolation on North Mountain. For generations, the clan’s children have suffered unspeakable acts of abuse, incest and psychological torture. The intolerant, self-righteous Gideonites decline to inte...

Critics and audiences alike have hailed Heather A. Clark's Chai Tea Sunday as a rich and powerful debut novel. Here, 30-something Nicky Fowler tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered marriage after it is destroyed in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy. Traveling to Kenya to volunteer at an orphanage, Nicky hopes that her fragile spirit can be repaired. Aided by chai-fueled conversations with her host mother, she develops the strength to put her life back on track.

Having earned a Scotiabank Giller Prize for her poignant novel Late Nights on Air, best-selling author Elizabeth Hay further enhances her literary legacy with another complex, captivating drama, Alone in the Classroom. Set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley, this finely honed tale begins in 1929 with a small-town school teacher helping an underprivileged child learn to read-all under the watchful eye of the school's domineering, enigmatic principal. From there, the story takes listeners...

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as we...