INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE GILLER PRIZEOctavio Notre-Dame comes from a long line of bakers. At the establishment known throughout the eighth district as the cake-slice, he produces baguettes and brioches with timeless perfection. But like generations of Notre-Dame men before him, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading. His only knowledge of the worl...

Ambrose Zephyr and his wife Zappora Ashkenazi (“Zipper”) have achieved a happy and balanced life together. The two live contentedly in a narrow London terrace full of books.That contentment is thrown into turmoil on Ambrose’s fiftieth birthday, when they receive the news that he has contracted a mysterious illness that will most certainly lead to his death within the month. In panicked delirium, from beneath their bed Ambrose withdraws an oxblood suitcase containing the ephemera of...

Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre Dame bakery and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two...

Some time around his fiftieth birthday, Ambrose Zephyr fails his annual medical check-up. An illness of inexplicable origin with no known or foreseeable cure is diagnosed and it will kill him within a month. Give or take a day. In the time that remains, he decides to travel to all the places he has most loved or ever wanted to visit, in strict alphabetical order. And so Ambrose and his wife Zipper embark on a strange adventure that takes them further and further away from home and doesn't ...

Kati Marton’s New York Times bestselling, “enthralling” (Vogue) memoir is one “of love and painful loss” (Kirkus Reviews) as she grapples with a new stage of her life.In this remarkably honest and candid memoir, award-winning journalist and distinguished author Kati Marton narrates an impassioned and romantic story of love, loss, and life after loss. Paris is at the heart of this deeply moving account. At every stage of her life, Marton f...

Winner of Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for FictionIn 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...

Above All Things is a heart-wrenchingly romantic historical novel by Tanis Rideout, based on British mountaineer George Mallory's fatal attempt to climb Everest, and his wife Ruth, who is left at home, waiting for him to return to her.**In the Himalayas two climbers strike out for the summit of the Earth's highest mountain - aiming to be the first to the top, and reclaim a little of Britain's lost glory.In Cambridge, a wife collects the milk, gets thre...

A superbly crafted, highly suspenseful, and deeply affecting debut novel about one man’s loyalty to his country, his family and his heritagePercival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English academy in 1960s Saigon, and he is well accustomed to bribing a forever-changing list of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of his school. Fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, he is quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided...

'My life begins at the Y...' Abandoned as a newborn at the doors of the local YMCA and then bounced between foster homes, Shannon eventually finds stability in the home of Miranda, a single mother with a daughter of her own. But as Shannon grows, so do her questions. Will she ever belong? Who is her true family? And why would her parents abandon Shannon on the day she was born?The answers lie in the heartrending tale of her mother, a headstrong young woman trapped in a series of ev...

An extraordinary new voice in contemporary woman's fiction, Courtney Miller Santo makes her magnificent debut with The Roots of the Olive Tree, a novel that will delight fans of Sarah Blake's The Postmistress, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and the works of Kristin Hannah.Set in a house on an olive grove in northern California, The Roots of the Olive Tree is a beautiful, touching story that brings to life five generations of women—incl...

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks.But in the quiet and ...

Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton AbbeyOn a summer's day in 1922, Cora Carlisle boards a train from Wichita, Kansas, to New York City, charged with the care of a stunningly beautiful young girl with a jet-black bob and wisdom way beyond her fifteen years.The girl is Louise Brooks and, for her, New York offers a chance of stardom beneath the bright lights of Broadway. For Cora, whose formative years were spent at The New York Ho...