In a world where loyalty is currency and betrayal demands blood, Karl English rules the underworld with cold calculation and a crooked grin. From back alley jewellery heists to transnational smuggling rings, his empire stretches from the shadows of Newcastle to the glittering coasts of Spain and beyond.Alongside his brother-in-arms Dale and a crew of misfits, Tipsy the lockpicker, Angus the muscle, Donald the fixer, and Nettie the quiet conscience, Karl builds a criminal network fu...

Set in the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, Once You Break a Knuckle tells stories of good people doing bad things: two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge fathers and break taboos. Crackling with tension and propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, the stories interconnect and reveal to us how our best intentions are doomed to fail or in...

Ballisticsis a family drama with two narratives, both set in Western Canada, thirty years apart. In 2003, while the firestorm rages through Kelowna, Alan West is asked to rescue his estranged father, Jack, who abandoned him as a baby. Alan’s grandfather has suffered a heart attack and wants to see his son once more before he dies. So Alan sets off with Puck, a three-legged English mastiff, and a boxful of photographs, newspaper clippings, and other items that once belonged to his father. H...

Featuring:M.J. Hyland, Alison MacLeod, Jon McGregor, K.J. Orr and S.W. Wilson.‘We are living through a golden moment in the history of the short story,’ wrote The Guardian recently, and the annual BBC National Short Story Award is both a testament to this, and one of the reasons why we are. Now in its sixth year, the Award supports and showcases Britain’s best new short fiction and continues to champion the short story as a central literary form.The...

'Startlingly original stories.'S Magazine'Together they assert that love is more heart-breaking and transforming that the word necessarily conveys.'ObserverLove is not a singular concept.In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from Philautia, self-love, to Agape, love for humanity; and from Storge, a natural affection for family, to Mania, a frenzied, obsessive love....

The Winner of the BBC Short Story Award, “The Dead Roads” was acclaimed as “note perfect” and “perfectly constructed” by the jury. Wilson’s unforgettable tale of two friends trying to win the affections of a girl in the middle of a road-trip through a gothic landscape is a masterpiece of tension and understatement.

It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire. Fleeing the fallout of a relationship gone wrong, Alan West returns to the small town in the valley where he grew up. There, his grandfather, Cecil, suffers a heart attack and gives him one last task: he must track down the father he's never known, so that Cecil can make his peace. And so Alan begins his search for the elusive Jack West, a man who skipped town decades earlier and of whom Cecil has always refused to speak. The quest will le...

'No one has measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.'Zelda FitzgeraldLove is not a singular concept.In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from Philautia, self-love, to Agape, love for humanity; and from Storge, a natural affection for family, to Mania, a frenzied, obsessive love:La Douleur Exquise (the pain of unrequited love)Before It Disappears...

‘Funny and Addictive!’ Fabulous MagazineFunny, sad and honest, if you loved Sophie Kinsella’s Wedding Night and Phaedra Patrick’s The Library of Lost and Found, this is the book for you.Five years ago at university they had been seven friends who laughed hard and loved harder…Nicky and Miles were the couple that were always meant to be. Leigha and Adam, not so much.So when Adam and Harriet grow clo...

From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada's most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney's.In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye...

**AN EPIC TALE OF A UKRAINIAN FAMILY’S STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE“Remarkable. . . . Mitchell’s harrowing story delivers an unforgettable literary tribute to an immigrant people and their struggle. The lyrical style, the riveting historical material, and the treatment of prejudice make the novel a great book-club choice.”—Booklist (starred review)**“Utterly gripping. Epic in scope, this tale of family feuds, violence and hardship follows the fortunes of Theo...

Longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller PrizeCritically lauded, The Beggar’s Garden is a brilliantly surefooted, strikingly original collection of nine linked short stories that will delight as well as disturb. The stories follow a diverse group of curiously interrelated characters, from bank manager to crackhead to retired Samaritan to web designer to car thief, as they drift through each other’s lives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. These engrossing ...