Lambda Literary Award finalistMichael V. Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male-a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, readi...

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith's latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenag...

Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls int...

Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home.At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country...

The New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of Secret Daughter returns with an unforgettable story of family, responsibility, love, honor, tradition, and identity, in which two childhood friends—a young doctor and a newly married bride—must balance the expectations of their culture and their families with the desires of their own hearts.The first of his family to go to college, Anil Patel, the golden son, carries the weight of tradition and his fa...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE**'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...'This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded...

THE RUNAWAY GLOBAL BESTSELLER'Gripping, enthralling - a top-notch thriller and a compulsive read.' SJ Watson, bestselling author of BEFORE I GO TO SLEEPRachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERINSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Singular' Daily Telegraph'Powerful' New York Times'Vital' i'Vivid… Moving… Juicy' NPR'A profoundly talented writer' Elizabeth Day'Raw, harrowing, and often heartbreaking' LA Times'Written by a sensitive soul' GuardianBefore the world premiere of Juno Elli...

2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards Gold Medal Winner 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner 2022 Over the Rainbow Short List 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist 2021 Bookshop's Indie Press Highlights You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human ex...

Stonewall Book Award Honor Book winner; Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Non-Fiction finalistIvan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada’s Yuk...

**A New York Times Bestseller"Funny, subversive, and able to excavate such brutally honest sentences that you find yourself nodding your head in wonder and recognition."—Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights and Hamilton: An American Musical**Are you a sensible, universally competent individual? Are you tired of the crushing monotony of leaping gracefully from one lily pad of success to the next? Are you sick of doing ...

Jennifer has always been a wallflower, so when Mike Palmer flatters her—and asks her out—she feels on top of the world. But Mike's a sports nut, and soon Jennifer feels like she's playing second fiddle to every sport televised. Her ultimatum has Mike reconsidering their relationship. But it's after they elope when Jennifer’s problems really begin and she discovers the man she thought she’d known may have ulterior motives for making her his bride.Tonya Thomas writes stories about is...