Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. After ten years of war, Troy has fallen to the Greeks, and Cassandra is now a prisoner, shackled outside the gates of Agamemnon's Mycenae. Through memories of her childhood and reflections on the long years of conflict, Cassandra pieces together the fall of her city. From a woman living in an age of heroes, here is the untold personal story overshadowed by the battlefield triumphs ...

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her earliest novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists. Her past continued to permeate her work and her life, as she said, “You can only fight sorrow when y...

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle.Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider-and then she discovers the appalling secret b...

The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writerThree years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the e...

First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of peop...

Shortlisted for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel AwardLonglisted for the 2016 Leacock Medal for Humour WritingWinner of an Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY)Freddy has problems. Some of them are because he's autistic. Most of them are because he's a teenager.When he’s seven years old, Freddy's mother walks him to the train station, sits him on a bench, kisses his forehead, and disappears from his life. In a few short days, everything chang...

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...

“Told with such humour and suspense that it’s hard to put down . . . A rare achievement, an unstintingly honest, hilarious, and dreadful delight.” — Globe and MailGreer Pentland is having a challenging year. Her teenaged son, Sam, is on trial for the murder of two senior citizens, a crime allegedly committed while he was sleepwalking. Greer is also battling breast cancer, a disease that has left her with a litany of physical side effects and deep anger tow...

From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selectionWinner of the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English TranslationAn abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.We’re nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essence unto ourselves, unique and dissonant, the only members ...

It’s 1933 and Mabel just wants to bake bread. She leaves the cold shack she shares with her father for the warmth of her kneading table at Cameron’s store and gets caught in a snow storm, sparking events that expose the raw humanity of those around her. Loyalty and betrayal, guilt and shame, and faith and doubt collide as the dirty secrets of the bleak coal mining community throw lives into turmoil. A series of brutal attacks, a murder, and an ambitious sergeant intent on seeing someone ha...

A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman’s first new novel for adults since his #1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys.This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real...

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...