An old man in a military uniform and a Santa hat is dumped at the police station. He doesn’t speak English, and a lawyer’s business card is baited on the meat hook that hangs on his neck. As a lawyer, a police officer and a translator struggle to unravel the truth, they uncover a past that won’t stay buried, and a decades-old quest for justice that must be served.This edition includes a foreword by Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court of Canada justice and former Chief Prosecutor of...

In Greenland, the discovery of a new island off the nation's coast mirrors a growing rift between the island’s discoverer and his family. In Iceland, set against the backdrop of the banking crisis, a confrontation between a real estate agent and a tenant takes an unexpected turn. A young woman's idealism is challenged by the infamous whale hunt in Faroe Islands. Nicolas Billon's critically acclaimed trilogy asks the audience to consider the values that guide human relations. As the charact...

An eminent psychiatrist has vanished from his office. The last person to have seen him is Michael, a troubled patient.Dr. Greenberg, the hospital director, is determined to question Michael, ignoring the head nurse's cryptic warnings. Michael speaks of elephants and opera—with the occasional hint of murder and foul play. Fraught with mind games and verbal tugs-of-war, The Elephant Song is a cat-and-mouse game that will keep you guessing until its haunting conclusion.

On the cusp of the Depression, Sheilagh Driscoll of isolated Rennie’s Bay nearly dies while giving birth prematurely to baby Leah. Sheilagh is attended by a traditional Mi’kmaq midwife, Mrs. Mary, as well as by Leah Clarke, a nurse-midwife from England. Baby Leah Mary survives but develops serious asthma, which requires treatment throughout her childhood. Traumatized by the birth and her daughter’s chronic illness, Sheilagh learns about age-old ways of preventing pregnancy. The result is a...

While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children’s circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations. With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada’s finest authors as she examines the impos...

Before her plane even touches down in Newfoundland, Cheryl is already plotting her escape. She knows life on this rock will be no better than it was in the other places she’s been forced to live ever since her parents launched their cross-Canada tour. The unwilling spectator of her father’s morbid fascination with “dying cultures,” Cheryl has seen more than her fair share of towns so depressing they could haunt your dreams. His decision to study the defunct fishing industry in St. John’s i...

Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré's second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery...

One night, Agatha Winter's phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It's the anniversary of their mother's accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches "willing amnesia": liberation by deliberately forgetting and disowning the past. But "willing amnesia" is no innovation: it runs in the family. The girls...

Through the braided narratives of three spirited characters, this novel bears witness to the infamous “American” crime that metastasized uber-civilized Montreal. Everyone wants a Marin at her party. Bohemian and beautiful, this engineering student is as passionate about constructing sets for theater and opera as she is about Trey, the one man she can finally trust. Deirdre is a first year engineering major, earnest and perceptive, but too naïve to know that frat boys can be dangerous. Mont...

Sisters Jennifer and Sarah were once part of a happy, stable family, but their idyllic life comes to an abrupt halt with the death of their mother. Unable to cope with his grief and the needs of his two young daughters, their father finds comfort in alcohol, gets fired from his job, and loses his grip on his family.As twelve-year-old Jennifer approaches maturity, she starts to develop a tough exterior, especially when she attracts unwelcome attention from one of her father’s friend...

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock’s deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgängers, the Kraken and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few a...