Mid-summer, 1948. Two strangers, Anna Beer and young Robert Seidel, meet on a train as they return to Vienna, where life is just resuming after the upheavals of war. Men who were conscripted into the German army are filtering back home, including Anna’s estranged husband, Dr. Anton Beer, who was held prisoner in a brutal Russian camp. But when Anna returns to their old apartment, she finds another man living there and her husband missing.At his own house, Robert is greeted by a you...

“The laws of Smoke are complex. Not every lie will trigger it. A fleeting thought of evil may pass unseen; a fib, an excuse, a piece of flattery. Next thing you know its smell is in your nose. There is no more hateful smell in the world than the smell of Smoke.”England. A century ago, give or take a few years.An England where people who are wicked in thought or deed are marked by the Smoke that pours forth from their bodies, a sign of their fallen ...

Vienna under the Nazis. A string of murders throws the city into a state of anxiety. Anton Beer, a young doctor who has made a study of forensic psychology, is asked by the retired Professor Speckstein to investigate the slaughter of his dog, which may or may not be related to the murders. It is an unwelcome request: Speckstein’s job is to spy on the building’s residents for the Party, and Doctor Beer has his own reasons for keeping his private life hidden from public scrutiny. Beer’s life...

Set during the winter of 1946-47, one of the coldest on record, Pavel & I unfolds against the tattered social fabric of postwar Berlin. Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue colonel in the British Armed Forces and a Soviet general when an American friend deposits a dead Russian spy in his frozen apartment. The race to take possession of the dead spy's quarry soon begins threatening Pavel's friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his buddin...

The electrifying sequel to the national bestseller Smoke—bringing readers back to a world Entertainment Weekly called “part Dickens, part dystopia and totally immersive.”The year is 1909. It has been ten years since Thomas Argyle, Charlie Cooper and Livia Naylor set off a revolution by releasing Smoke upon the world. They were raised to think Smoke was a sign of sin manifest, but later learned that its suppression was really a means of controlling...

Graham Greene meets Dostoevsky in a thrilling and atmospheric story of guilt and restitution set in postwar Vienna.Vienna, 1948. The war is over, and as the initial phase of de-Nazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier after discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerlan...

The much-anticipated follow-up to The Birth House, The Virgin Cure secures Ami McKay's place as one of our most powerful storytellers."I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart."The Virgin Cure begins in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. A series of betrayals lead Moth, at only twelve years old, to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, whe...

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book and for The Globe 100 Books in 2013."In the creation of David Slaney, Lisa Moore brings us an unforgettable character, embodying the exuberance and energy of misspent youth. Caught is a propulsive and harrowing read."—Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters BrothersInternationally acclaimed author Lisa Moore offers us a...

In 1960s Colorado, a shy bookseller must reconcile her quiet life with the tantalizing world of her dreams.Denver, 1962: Kitty Miller once loved a doctor named Kevin, but it didn't work out the way she had hoped. Now she leads a quiet life, running a bookshop with her best friend and enjoying the freedom that comes with being single. Then the dreams begin.Denver, 1963: Katharyn Andersson is married to Lars, the love of her life. They have beautiful children, ...

**From the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage.With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.**Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families—the public one and the secret...

Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeIn 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twenty-five years later, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

Part of the inaugural Kanata Classics list, with a new introduction by Sharon Bala, Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow--of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and ...