What happens when an English teacher goes into labour during a high school lockdown?High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant and trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha’s suicide attempt. Maria, the school’s counsellor, is second-guessing her decis...

Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes – perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until meaning settles in a hundred different ways.Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Oldrick must come to term...

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceau?escu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; an...

“BriannaSusannaAlana” is named for the three sisters who tell the story. Brianna is the youngest, six years old; Susanna is ten; and, Alana is nearly 13. When a murder is committed in the apartment block nearby, the three sisters are forced to consider their world in a new way. Each sister tells her story of the day the murder, each story weaves through her sisters, touching down on remembrances and imaginings.

In the stories of Mad Hope, Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both unrecognizable and alarming. We think we know these people but discover we don't-they are more alive, more real, and more complex than we first imagined. A high school science teacher is forced to re-examine the role he played in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania after a student makes a shocking request. The uncertainty, anxiety, and anticipation of pregnancy are examined through ...

What happens when an English teacher goes into labour during a Toronto high school lockdown?High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant. She’s trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha, who is in peril. Maria, the school's counselor, is second-guessing ...

In 'Frogs,' a short story from Heather Birrell's Mad Hope, a science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceaușescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request. A free e-book single from the Journey-Prize-winning short story author.

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012) Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013) 'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild, and Michel Foucault. It's a thrilling, brilliant, and really hot place to be.' -- Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginit...

A fully realized portrait of one woman's life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning authorAn ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in thi...

September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian's brother Will during the Great War, but in 1917 Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family.But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He holds a secret deep in his s...

Jimmy Rabbitte is back.The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids ... and bowel cancer. He isn’t dying, he thinks, but he might be.Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle – his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments – Outspan, whose own il...

Ronnie, an engaged hairdresser with a history of teenage recklessness, feels stifled by the predictable, comfortable life laid out before her. Charlie, an anxiety-ridden writer, feels suffocated by his literary success and familial responsibility, including a bread-winning wife and a child with autism. When the unlikely pair meets, a torrid affair provides both with a false reality that offers solace in its secrets.