Meet Frederick Madrigal: the seventh son of a struggling woman on welfare who already had three sets of male twins spaced two years apart. A one-time child prodigy, Frederick was the subject of the benevolent index finger of God. While his older brothers ran wild, the sensitive and musically gifted Frederick began to sneak out of the house to sing for spare change in front of city bars and nightclubs, his repertoire learned from his mother’s secret midnight singing. Through the interventio...

"This is the story of everything that happened after my friend Kit had a meltdown at school.”Best friends Mila and Kit spend their days doing fun things: they go to the skate park, play Truth or Dare, and pet the neighborhood cats. Mila’s favorite thing to do is draw her Shy Cat comics. But Kit’s is probably eating afternoon snacks. The first time Kit went to Mila’s house, he ate three bananas in a row without asking! Mila thinks rude is rude, but her mom says that...

Esa Withrod is a young woman struggling over recent events in her personal life—a failed first relationship and resulting pregnancy—as well as the legacy of her desolate upbringing. Eccentric and enigmatic, Esa’s childhood has prepared her to deal with the world with endurance and resilience, but not with joy. She remains “mystified by kindness” and the friendship offered to her by her employer, Merle, a cartographer, and his partner, Daniel. The only bright spot in Esa’s childhood was the...

After leaving the Winnipeg Police force, former Inspector Frank Foote has gone into home renovations. Tearing down a wall on a Norwood Flats job one day, he and his partner come across the skeleton of a small female who has been imprisoned there. They alert the police, who confiscate their tools and remove them from the crime scene. Frank doesn’t tell them about the photograph he’s found tucked in the wall space with the young woman. He may be retired, but his investigative instincts are s...

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...

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...

The Setting Lake Sun, J.R. Léveillé's first novel set in his native Manitoba, describes the unforgettable encounter of Angèle, an aspiring young Métis architect, with Ueno Takami, an older Japanese poet. The story begins when they meet at an art gallery in Winnipeg, a city surprisingly rich both physically, in its architecture, and culturally, with its mix of heritage and customs brought by people who have emigrated there from all over the world. From Winnipeg, Angèle and Ueno hea...

Stony Point tells the story of a woman who succeeds in doing things at a time when custom restricts her from doing anything. In 1903, shortly after the Frank slide, a newspaper reporter vanishes from a mining town in the Crowsnest Pass. Lucille travels to Stony Point in search of her sister's husband. She finds a town under the heel of a ruthless mine owner who has the local Mounted Policeman and a corrupt businessman in his pocket. Determined to find Stanley Birch, Lucille turns Stony Poi...

Body Trade weaves together two stories of survival. The main narrative follows Rosie and Tanya, two young Canadian women who decide to leave the Northwest Territories and head south on an ill-conceived road trip through California, Mexico and Central America. The story takes a life-defining twist when their search for freedom and adventure beings them into contact with predators of the Central American sex trafficking trade. The girls' journey into unknown and dangerous territory is punctu...

Over Our Heads is a novel that weaves together the histories of two very different half-sisters who return home to deal with the aftermath that occurs when the grandmother who raised them dies. Emma, a punk band singer and poet turned pet psychic, and Rachel, an actuary with an interest in astronomy, both carry the remnants of childhoods overshadowed by issues of bullying, abandonment, alienation and fear. In the raw terrain of profound loss, the two sisters struggle through the stages of ...

When Vito Santoro’s body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth. They all a...

Piano tuner Frank Ryan is paid in kind by an aging music teacher with an old manuscript that turns out to be Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.Launched into a world of intrigue and violence, Ryan, an unlikely sleuth, realizes he must use his wits to conquer his enemies and solve the mystery of the manuscript. In the process Ryan discovers whom he can trust and what he is made of. The first in a series featuring Frank Ryan, Beethoven’s Tenth is a smart page-turner...