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...

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...

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, 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.

When Carol Milford, a young, liberated woman from St. Paul, Minnesota, marries small-town doctor Will Kennicott, she suddenly finds herself transplanted to Gopher Prairie. Horrified by her new home, an ugly backwater community, she decides it's time the town made a few changes.The story of an idealistic young woman's frustrated attempts to change the set ways of her small town, Main Street has been hailed as one of the essential literary satires of the American scene. An a...

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...

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe DannerA New York Times Notable Book of the Year • One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year • Named One of the best books of the Year by The Telegraph and EsquireHere, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the...

***Shortlisted for 2013 Giller Prize*** After two acclaimed historical novels, one of Canada' s most celebrated young writers now gives us the vibrant, contemporary story of a man studying the suddenly confusing shape his life has taken, and why, and what his responsibilities-- as a husband, a father, a brother, and an uncle-- truly are. Charlie Bellerose leads a seminomadic existence, traveling widely to manage the language academies he has established in different countries. After separa...

From the internationally best-selling author of The History of Love comes this stunning novel. Great House follows the multiple owners of one writing desk and how the desk shapes their lives. A young novelist inherited the desk from a poet taken by Pinochet's police. Then the desk is stolen from her by the poet's supposed daughter. In its drawers, another man discovers a long-kept secret about his wife. And a Jerusalem antiques dealer uses the desk in his family's study, which was devastat...

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...