A critically acclaimed, award-winning author, Alix Ohlin pens a masterpiece of emotional complexity with Inside. In this literary tour de force, a therapist named Grace attempts to help a man recover from his failed suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Grace's teen patient Annie runs away from home to reinvent herself in New York, and Grace's ex-husband leaves the comfort of a successful relationship to attempt to help native peoples in the bleak Arctic. ''A skillful storyteller attractively quick-...

Kathleen Winter's poignant debut novel was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In it, Winter explores society's views of gender identity through the eyes of a child born with male and female sex organs. At their doctor's urging, the Blakes decide to raise their child as a boy, Wayne, giving him hormones to suppress his feminine physical traits. But after discovering the secret about his body, Wayne decides to stop taking his medication and lets his body develop naturally. "A compel...

A debut novel about the passionate loves and tragic losses of six generations of women in a family of firefighters, spanning from famine-era Ireland to Brooklyn a decade after 9/11. "There isn't anything in the world that hurts like a burn." No one knows the pain of a fire more than the women of the Keegan/O'Reilly clan. Kathleen Donohoe's stunning debut novel brings to life seven unsentimental, wry, and evocative portraits of women from a family of firefighters. When we meet Norah - the f...

This astute, entertaining literary thriller features Helena Marsh, an art authenticator hot on the trail of an extorted painting in Budapest, skirting the law to return it to its rightful heir. In the vein of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels comes this year's smart new thriller with literary chops When wealthy octogenarian Geza Marton hires art expert Helena Marsh to buy back his family's Titian painting, Helena flies to Budapest to close what she expects will be a reasonably simple s...

A poetic immersion into the life and art of Joan Mitchell, the great American abstract expressionist painterA contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell is not as well known as her male counterparts, not only because she was a woman but also because she spent most of her working life in France. Still, in 2013 Bloomberg listed Mitchell as the best-selling female artist of all time.When asked to talk about her paintings, Joan Mitchell often ...

Mixing the eccentricity of the circus world and the heart of a love story, The Thunder of Giants is a warm and engaging debut about two exceptional women -- both almost 8-feet tall The year is 1937 and Andorra Kelsey - 7'11 and just under 320 pounds - is on her way to Hollywood to become a star. Hoping to escape both poverty and the ghost of her dead husband, she accepts an offer from the wily Rutherford Simone to star in a movie about the life of Anna Swan, the Nova Scotia giantess who to...

Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then disappears. His absence will haunt his son, Douglas, as well as Alden and Sutton Kelly, the chi...

Critically acclaimed author Thomas Steinbeck, eldest son of the famous Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, pens a compelling tale of adventure and romance with The Silver Lotus. In the early 1800s, merchant Captain Jeremiah Macy Hammond is searching for new customers. Along the way, he comes up against pirates, storms, and illness. But when he falls for Lady Yee, prized daughter of a wealthy merchant family, he discovers that love is the greatest challenge of all.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Cynthia Ozick's fiction has been awarded multiple O. Henry Prizes. In Foreign Bodies, Ozick crafts a remarkable retelling of Henry James' The Ambassadors-deftly using its plot, yet boldly infusing the novel with an all new place, time, and meaning. It's 1952, and middle-aged Bea Nightingale reluctantly agrees to fly to Paris to help convince her estranged runaway nephew to return to his family. But Bea's experiences abroad will change her forever.

Talented novelist Kim Echlin pens this "powerful, transcendent love story" (Publishers Weekly) about two young lovers torn apart by political turmoil. Anne meets Serey-a Cambodian refugee-in MontrEal when she is just 16 years old. But when the Cambodian border opens up for only a short time, Serey returns to find his family. For years Anne hears no news, so she finally travels to the devastated country herself in search of answers.

Having earned a Scotiabank Giller Prize for her poignant novel Late Nights on Air, best-selling author Elizabeth Hay further enhances her literary legacy with another complex, captivating drama, Alone in the Classroom. Set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley, this finely honed tale begins in 1929 with a small-town school teacher helping an underprivileged child learn to read-all under the watchful eye of the school's domineering, enigmatic principal. From there, the story takes listeners...

A poignant and evocative novel of one Greek woman’s story of her own—and her nation’s—epic struggle in the aftermath of World War II.Aliki is one of the last of her kind, a lamenter who mourns and celebrates the passing of life. She is part of an evolving Greece, one moving steadily away from its rural traditions. To capture the fading folk art of lamenting, an American researcher asks Aliki to record her laments, but in response, Aliki sings her own story...