The Sacrifice is a haunting depiction of one family and its often tragic attempts to come to terms with a new life in a new country. It is a moving, almost biblical story of a father possessed by his hope for his only son; of a son who rebels against his father’s ideals, yet sacrifices himself to preserve what his father most prizes; and of a grandson who must reconcile the flaws in his inheritance.

Adele Wiseman, lifelong writing friend of Margaret Laurence, is best know for her novels, The Sacrifice, winner of the Governor-General’s Award in 1956, and Crackpot, Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Award in 1974. She also wrote essays, plays, and children’s books. Her poetry, the work of the last ten years of her life, and mostly unpublished, ranges in form from haiku to sonnets to subversive feminist epic; in content from poems about poetry (“Instructions...

The film adaptation of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, starring acclaimed actresses Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Page, and introducing Christine Horne, opens in theatres May 9, 2008.This special fortieth-anniversary edition of Margaret Laurence’s most celebrated novel will introduce readers again to one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Hagar Shipley is stubborn, querulous, self-reliant, and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her, ...

Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot, is one of the most captivating characters in Canadian fiction. Graduating from a tumultuous childhood to a life of prostitution, she becomes a legend in her neighbourhood, a canny and ingenious woman, generous, intuitive, and exuding a wholesome lust for life.Resonant with myth and superstition, this radiant novel is a joyous celebration of life and the mystery that is at the heart of all experience.

In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world.Trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness – her own and that of others – Rachel longs for love, and contact with another human being who shares her rebellious spirit. Through her summer affair with Nick Kazlik, a schoolmate from earlier years, she learns at last to reach out to another...

The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel.This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right – relinquished only in he...

Stacey MacAindra burns – to burst through the shadows of her existence to a richer life, to recover some of the passion she can only dimly remember from her past.The Fire-Dwellers is an extraordinary novel about a woman who has four children, a hard-working but uncommunicative husband, a spinster sister, and an abiding conviction that life has more to offer her than the tedious routine of her days.Margaret Laurence has given us another unforgettable heroine – human...

One of Canada’s most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up.In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod – a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl’s growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving...

Forced to flee England, the Andrews family books passage to a fresh start in a distant country, only to discover a barren, inhospitable land at the end of their crossing. To seventeen-year-old Lavinia, uprooted from everything familiar, it seems a fate worse than the one they left behind. Driven by loneliness she begins a journal. Random Passage satisfies the craving for those details that headstones and history books can never give: the real story of our Newfoundland ancestors, of how tim...

Rennie Wilford is a freelance journalist who takes an assignment in the Caribbean in the hopes of recuperating from her recently shattered life. On the tiny island of St. Antoine, she tumbles into a corrupt world where no one is what they seem, where her rules for survival no longer apply. This is a thoroughly gripping novel of intrigue and betrayal, which explores human defensiveness, the lust for power both sexual and political, and the need for a compassion that goes beyond what we ordi...

An award-winning collection of ten stories that charts the complexities of modern life and explores the strange and secret places of the heart. The gruesome discoveries of an archaeological dig in Britain find parallels in a contemporary love affair; a girl disappears without a trace and returns to haunt a collection of landscape paintings; a nineteenth-century case of mass-poisoning on the famous Franklin Expedition stirs memories of a dead friend; a woman exacts a fittingly wicked reveng...

Dancing Girls is Margaret Atwood’s highly praised first collection of short fiction. In it she explores the dark intricacies of the mind, the complexities of human relationships, and the clashes between cultures. In the stories, the mundane and the bizarre intersect in unexpected ways: ex-wives indulge in an odd feast at a psychiatrist’s funeral; a young student is pursued by an obsessed immigrant; an old woman stores up supplies against an impending cataclysm. The fourteen storie...