Long-listed for the ReLit Award, 2009 Reese Larkin is desperate to find the perfect mattress. His job is in jeopardy and he’s been forced to separate from his wife and children, but he believes that if he can find the ultimate sleep system his life will begin anew. In her seventh novel, Cordelia Strube grabs readers by the neuroses with a dark but wickedly fun story about a former Greenpeace activist forced to turn marketeer who battles against a world in which he is confronted by shift...
Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy's, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate's...
Longlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Lemon is the story of a teenaged girl with the numbers against her: three mothers, one deadbeat dad, one cancer-riddled protege, two friends, one tree-hugging stepbrother and a 60 percent average. The adults in her life are all mired in self-centeredness and the other kids are busy getting high, and she just can't be bothered to fit in.
Things aren't going Milo's way. His acting career is floundering, he got dumped, his miserable father vanished, and people keep moving into his house. He finally decides to take action — to help the only person he really likes, the autistic boy next door who's being bullied. But, well, that doesn't really go his way either.