An unflinching look at the human body and the ways it defines, fails, and frees usBuilding on themes introduced in her novel Girl in Shades, Allison Baggio explores the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds with In the Body, a collection of 12 short stories and the novella “As She Was.”Baggio’s range of voice and breadth of vision are showcased in stories like “Spilt Milk,” where an ordinary fare leads an Indo–Canadian taxi ...

A poignant novel of loss, growing up, and an unusually gifted girl finding her way in the world.Maya Devine has a strange ability to see colors that surround other people—and sometimes even to hear the thoughts in their heads. But even with these gifts, she still struggles to understand her mother, Marigold. Desperate for enlightenment, Marigold drags Maya to library lectures on making money and gardening as part of her home schooling; attends AA meetings even thou...

A Washington Post Notable Book: A Japanese Canadian man is haunted by childhood memories of WWII internment camps in this "evocative and cinematic tale" ( Maclean's).In 1942, in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government removes young Bin Okuma and his family from their home at a British Columbia coastal fishing village and forces them into internment camps. Allowed to take only the possessions they can carry, Bin watches looters r...

For fans of Alka Joshi’s The Henna Artist, comes a compelling love story set against a culture grounded in tradition, about to be changed forever in the onslaught of WWII.My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star. For a young girl growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos...

A testament to the healing power of unconditional love.Widely acclaimed for her emotionally powerful stories that capture the real lives of women, Heather A. Clark, bestselling author of Chai Tea Sunday, tackles the subject of childhood mental illness and the impact it has on a close family.The story begins from nine-year-old Nate’s point of view, etching the details of an unbalanced mind struggling to make sense of rampant thought patterns and hei...

"A warm-hearted story of one woman's journey from a dark and abusive childhood into the light of acceptance and love" from the author of Relative Happiness ( Atlantic Books Today).Can you really move forward without putting the past to rest?Grace Willingdon has everything she needs. For fifteen years she's lived in a trailer overlooking Bras d'Or Lake in postcard-perfect Baddeck, Cape Breton, with Fletcher Parsons, a giant teddy b...

The inspiration for the Hallmark Hall of Fame film Christmas Everlasting, “a feel-good goldmine” from the New York Times bestselling author (USA Today).Years of long workdays and little sleep as a political campaigner are about to pay off now that Lucy Toomey’s boss is entering the White House. But when her estranged older sister, Alice, unexpectedly dies, Lucy is drawn back to Nilson’s Bay, her small, close-knit Wisconsin hometown.

On a scorching August day in 1963, seven-year-old Annie Banks meets the girl who will become her best friend. Skinny, outspoken Starr Dukes and her wandering preacher father may not be accepted by polite society in Jackson, Mississippi, but Annie and Starr are too busy sharing secrets and playing elaborate games of Queen for a Day to care. Then, as suddenly as she appeared in Annie's life, Starr disappears.Annie grows up to follow the path ordained for pretty, well-to-do Jackson wo...

Captivating and heart-wrenching from start to finishWhen Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a startling new ha...

“Hilarious and big-hearted, The Nest is a stellar debut.” — PeopleA warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonab...

In this true story, Armande Martel, a young nun from Quebec, is arrested by the Germans in 1940 during a stay at her religious order’s mother house in Brittany. She spends the war years in a German concentration camp. After her return to Canada, she leaves the Church, finds the love of her life in Montreal, and adopts Lise Dion.Growing up, Lise is familiar with only a few facts of her mother’s past. It’s when she clears her mother’s small apartment after her death that Lise Dion di...

Marie finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at 39. Meanwhile, her best friend, Elizabeth, has never been able to conceive, despite years of fertility treatments. In a genetic test routinely offered to older mothers, Marie discovers that the child she is carrying has Down syndrome. Intertwined throughout the novel is the story of Margaret, a woman who gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome in 1947, when such infants were considered to be “unfinished” children. As the novel shifts through...