**Shortlisted for the 2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeGlobe & Mail "Best Canadian Fiction of 2016"This breakout novel from Giller Prize finalist Michael Helm is a genre-bending work of astonishing vision and a dazzling story of our times.**A neuroscientist retreats to a secluded cabin in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A failed poet is lured to Rome as a "literary detective" to...

About the BookThis book is a day by day journey through the Gospels, a journey where you can discover the life of Jesus as if you were actually there; seeing, hearing, and experiencing the miraculous Love of God as told by those who were closest to Him. Feel the faith of Mary even as she ponders what it will mean to bear God’s Son, and her husband Joseph as he first struggles with the news of her pregnancy, but then demonstrates the meaning of obedience to God. See the Disciples as...

In Cities of Refuge, Michael Helm’s keenly anticipated new novel, a single act of violence resonates through several lives, connecting closeby fears to distant political terrors. At the story’s centre is the complex, intensely charged relationship between a 28-year-old woman and the father who abandoned her when she was young.One summer night on a side street in downtown Toronto, Kim Lystrander is attacked by a stranger. Thrown deep into turmoil, in the weeks and m...

A riveting memoir of one marine rifleman's journey from Parris Island through the hell of Vietnam and the Tet Offensive with the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines.In 1967, a young E. Michael Helms boarded a bus to the legendary grounds of Parris Island, where mere boys were forged into hardened Marines—and sent to the jungles of Vietnam. It was the first stop on a journey that would forever change him—and by its end, he would be awarded the Purple Heart Medal, Comba...

A man of failing reputation, Toss Raymond lives alone by the South Saskatchewan River, near the drought-ruined farm town of Mayford. It’s the summer of 1988, a year since Toss’s marriage went south, and he made a public spectacle of himself by thrashing the neighbour who he wrongly thought had cuckolded him. Now, as he finishes what might be his last year as a high school teacher and the school board gathers grounds for his dismissal, Toss has taken up with two newcomers in town, and neith...

Twenty-six writers in Canada were asked to contribute pieces of original work describing how they see writing today. From Atwood’s opening, through writing from Indigenous writers, the reader is given a sense of how twenty-seven of the country’s finest writers see their world today. With an introduction by the editors, Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Tessa McWatt.Contributors include: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Madeleine Thien, M G Vassanji, Lawrence Hill, Pascale Q...

God's Scoundrels and Misfits examines the relationships of biblical characters with God and with each other. Some took advantage of the second chances God offered them while others missed the opportunities to change the direction of their lives. Lessons learned from the choices they made and the outcomes they experienced are explored in the context of modern families and individuals. Sibling rivalry, unbridled ambition, women's issues, suffering, and forgiveness are some of the issues that...

Mac’s girlfriend, Kate Bell, thinks she’s seen a ghost. Wes Harrison, Kate’s former boyfriend, supposedly perished twelve years ago in a boating accident. But now she swears a man she spotted in a crowded theater lobby is Wes. Mac has his doubts--it was only a fleeting glimpse. But to calm her shattered nerves, he starts making inquiries. A clue leads him from his home in St. George, Florida, to a Texas orphanage. There he uncovers startling information that turns both his and Kate’s world...

“The first cast of the day turned my dream vacation into a nightmare. . . .” After twenty-four years in the U.S. Marines, recently retired Mac McClellan is happy to be a civilian again. He is enjoying a leisurely fishing vacation in the Florida panhandle when he hooks a badly decomposed body. Then, when a bag of rare marijuana is discovered stashed aboard his rental boat, he realizes someone is setting him up to take the fall for murder and drug smuggling. Mac’s plans for a more laid-back ...

For fans of Joshua Cohen and Ben Lerner, After James captures the dystopian strangeness of our current world.A neuroscientist walks out of her life and isolates herself in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A recently orphaned graduate school dropout is hired as a “literary detective” to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who writes about disappearances and murders with an inexplicably precise...

A dark and comic novel, Congratulations On Everything tracks the struggles, frailties, and cruelly pyrrhic victories of the middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant and a 30ish lunch-shift waitress.Jeremy has bought into the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line, and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he’s risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack.Everyone assumes Ice Shack d...

From the award-winning author of The Lake of Dead Languages comes a “gripping read with emotion-charged twists and turns” (Tess Gerritsen) about a professor accused of killing her student in a hit-and-run accident.Nan Lewis—a creative writing professor at a university in upstate New York—is driving home from a faculty holiday party when she hits a deer. Yet when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is gone. Eager to get home before the oncoming...