Category: Fiction

After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire — to make his wife happy — leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.

Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of a community through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up this city — bisected by railway lines and rivers, connected by boulevards and back alleys — are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit — this place of memory, amnesia, longing, and belonging.

Featuring a cast of eclectic characters, Once More With Feeling is about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.

( Courtesy of House Of Anansi Press Inc. )

*** please note:  this is  an uncorrected proof edition ( 432 pages )

At once a powerful love story and an intricately plotted mystery,Winterton Blue is the breathtaking new novel from the Booker Prize finalist and national best-selling author of The Hiding Placeand Remember Me. For the last twenty years, Lewis has been haunted by his brother’s death. Then, on a quest to finally find the person he believes is responsible, he meets Anna, who is haunted by her mother. Except her mother, Rita, happens to be very much alive and is the exact opposite of her daughter; loud, carefree, and a daredevil. At seventy-six, she still runs a guest house overflowing with cocktails, music hall turns, and her boyfriend, Vernon, a retired actor and bon vivant. Recognizing a kindred spirit in each other, Lewis and Anna are at first too headstrong to admit they are susceptible to love. Against the backdrop of the Norfolk coast, with its massive skies and relentless seas, they must learn to trust each other and accept that an uncertain future can be as wild and alluring as the landscape they have grown to love.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads,   271 pages )

E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their successive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past—voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx’s prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language makeAccordion Crimes a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.

( from the sleeve,   431 pages )

The fatal and desperate politics of Eastern Europe collide with the comparative innocence and complacency of suburban Australian life in this powerful and disturbing love story about two families and the madness that invades their lives.

Terry Delaney leads a relatively satisfying life as a security guard and as a passionate rugby player with a shot at pro-team success. But Terry’s life is shaken beyond recognition when he falls obsessively in love with Danielle Kabbel, the daughter of his employer, Rudi Kabbel. Rudi, a half-mad/half-charming immigrant from Eastern Europe, suffers from visions of an impending apocalypse and from the demons of a tormented childhood.

The family madness runs deep, from the Kabbel family patriarch, Stanek, a Nazi collaborator who betrayed his wife to save his own neck, to Rudi’s traumatic childhood in which he was a pawn between the Nazis and the Russians. It is into this maelstrom of devastating history and present day insanity that Terry is drawn–to his own desperate peril.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads,   336 pages )

A brilliant young Indian woman is caught between her own almost limitless capacity for experience – emotional, intellectual, sexual – and the desire of the men in her life to capture and define her. Against the background of Calcutta, New York and London, she struggles to conform to the blueprints for family, marriage, and friendships that society lays down for her. But dramatically fails …

( from the sleeve,   266 pages )

“I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.”

The Italians called them “Mud Angels,” the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city’s treasured art from the Arno’s flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. For within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings.

Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume–a sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth in this exquisite novel of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

( from the sleeve,   369 pages )