The second novel by award-winning novelist Jennifer Quist is a black comedy of birth, death, love, marriage, mothers-in-law—and five sassy sisters. When Suzanne’s role as the perfect daughter-in-law ends in a deadly accident, she panics, makes a monumentally bad decision, and upends her world. The bond with her sisters is the strongest force Suzanne knows, and it may be the one that can keep her from ruin. Quist’s new novel is hilarious, spine-chilling, satisfying, and original. A romp.

A breathtaking literary debut, Love Letters of the Angels of Death begins as a young couple discover the remains of his mother in her mobile home. The rest of the family fall back, leaving them to reckon with the messy, unexpected death. By the time the burial is over, they understand this will always be their role: to liaise with death on behalf of people they love. They are living angels of death. All the major events in their lives – births, medical emergencies, a move to a northern boo...

Morgan Turner’s grief over her sister’s brutal murder has become a rut, an everyday horror she is caught in along with her estranged parents and chilly older brother. In search of a way out, she delves the depths of a factory abattoir, classic horror cinema, and the Canadian criminal justice system, as it tries her sister’s killer and former lover, who is arguing that he is “Not Criminally Responsible” for his actions because of mental illness. Whatever the verdict, Morgan -- with the help...

In a challenge to monolingual, Anglophone dominated creative writing workshops, this book explores why and how students' multilingual backgrounds and lack of fluency with the English language can emerge as assets rather than impediments to artistry and creativity. Grounded in the Chinese tradition of Daoism as an ongoing discourse, this exploration uses rigorous academic readings of the philosophical text, the Zhuangzi, as an analytical framework and takes a trans...

The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided ...

It’s summer in Toronto, and the snow and ice are relentless. Too bad no one but Avery can see it. Avery Gauthier can’t get far enough away from her past: the death of her beloved father, the abuse she suffered as a teen, and the religion that tore her parents apart. A reality-refugee, she’s managed to keep the chaos of her former life at bay… until now. When her husband returns to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, her estranged mother wants back in, and the snow (invisible to everyone but Avery) pi...

After losing her job and learning she might also lose her house because of a bad investment, Jess, a fiercely independent and hilariously wry BC grandma, resorts to growing pot in her basement to make ends meet. She then has to juggle her public life as a grandmother and member of the town’s senior women’s group – The Company of Crones – with her secret life as a pot grower. The unusual characters she meets along the way include Swan, the enigmatic young woman who introduces her to the gro...

“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”When his parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains detached, striking up a relationship with a woman in a neighbouring house … and stumbling across evidence that his mother may have engaged in a...

A story of family malfunction. The Leacock Medal-longlisted novel from the author of Relative Happiness—now an award-winning feature film.In a Cape Breton family of black sheep, Mary is pure as the driven snow. She is patient and kind with her alcoholic grandmother and volatile mother, loyal and attentive to her spoiled cousin, and pleasant and polite all day as a grocery cashier. Her well-off aunt, the only other normal person in the family, wants to help...

“Vivid and fresh and finely crafted, this is a book that will strike a chord with anyone who has loved, lived, or wondered how we manage, in the face of our fragility, to carry on.” — Nino RicciThis is the story of Zee, an aimless ex-lawyer who has turned his inability to make a decision into a fine art, and his wife, Alex, a practical and hard-working social worker who feels her biological clock ticking loudly. Reverberating with the emotional crises of the urban ...

2017 Evergreen Award, Forest of Reading — NominatedA sister. A baby. A man who watches from the trees.Fara and her husband buy a house with a disturbing history that reawakens memories of her own family tragedy. Maddy still lives in the house, once a hippie commune, where her daughter was kidnapped twenty-seven years ago. Rose grew up isolated with her mother in the backwoods north of Montreal. Now in the city, she questions the silence and decepti...

In The Distance Between Us, Noah Bly presents a blistering portrait of a troubled family, of bonds that can be battered but never broken, and of the friendships that can make us whole again.Hester Parker resides in an elegant Victorian house in the town of Bolton, Illinois. She spends her evenings listening to the lush tones of Mahler and Chopin, drinking sub-par Merlot, and reflecting on a life that has suddenly fallen apart. At seventy-one, Hester is as brillian...