The day Pauline sees Ramona’s mug shot in the paper, she knows she’s going to be called upon to relive the darkest period of her life. Charged with murder, Ramona and her husband, Jim, have also been accused of sexually abusing female victims for years in their home. And when the police discover a stash of scripts for disturbing plays performed years earlier by Pauline, Ramona, and Jim, Pauline becomes a key witness in the trial. Tell Everything follows Pauline as she prepares for her...
Inappropriate Behaviour has a magnetism as alluring as the sirens, summoning readers to revel in the coy seduction that preludes desire, the truths women deny and the longing they supress, unleashed in startling moments of betrayal, loss, and reclamation. Mock widens the threshold–exposing a desire not only for touch, but for understanding, for family, for a love which satiates more than the physical appetite. With wry humour and tender intensity Mock unveils heroic acts of domestic courage...
It’s no secret that Sylvia is a little crazy. People have thought so ever since she first came to town when she was a teenager. But outside her own family, no one knows the depth of her mental illness. For her daughter, Mercy, Sylvia’s illness is at once a source of agony and fascination. Mercy’s mother is absent from her life on several occasions. First, she is taken away to a mental hospital for treatment. Later, on a summer night in the early 1980s, Sylvia disappears entirely, never to be...
Susan Ouriou's first novel explores a season in the life of three women, two sisters – on an artist, the other a codemaker – and their mother. The women have made their separate ways from Montreal to Mexico, the land of their father and husband gone missing ten years ago. Their reunion is a grudging one and their love often aching, uncertain, and flawed. The women's family resembles that of the damselfish, a family of dear enemies where each member jealously guards its own patch of...
For Sylvie, Ragged Island – and the whales who swam around it – is the only world she has ever known. It is the place where she was born and raised, where she lived with her four late husbands, and where she plans to live out her remaining years. It is also the home to a community whose love for the island is immense. But when the Nova Scotia government decides to shut down the ferry service that is the lifeblood of Ragged Island, the residents see their world beginning to disappear. Sea of...
Harriet’s acting career suffers a catastrophic setback when memory loss forces her to quit her role as Sarah Bernhardt. In turmoil, she accepts the role of Mazo de la Roche in a production written by an amateur playwright and being performed in small-town Saskatchewan. Harriet soon discovers that she was chosen for this role because she holds the key to a secret from Mazo’s past. Meanwhile, the play, the role, and the town draw Harriet into the vortex of her own past.
Like any young man, Etienne longs for independence and dreams about a bright future. But he's a Tourangeau, part of a sprawling Quebec family that, though destitute, thrives as insecurely as weeds in a well-tended garden, nurtured by a mother whose abundant love is more than maternal. Then he meets Odile, a beautiful young woman from a good family who inspires Etienne to transform his future into something worthy of her. But, like Romeo and Juliet, their wild, pure love for each other...
At the dawn of the twentieth century a disparate group of travellers are thrown together in the Caucasus Mountains, fabled land of Argonauts, Amazons, and Cossacks. Henry Norman, a British Member of Parliament and author, teams up with Canadian radio pioneer and amateur archaeologist Reginald Fessenden and Katherine Waddell, the lover of Fessenden's dead friend, Ottawa poet Archibald Lampman. Each has a question. Fessenden seeks physical confirmation of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and...
Short-listed for the 2004 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel After her marriage breaks down, shy schoolteacher Blithe Morrison takes refuge for the summer with her parents in the affluent Toronto neighbourhood of Rose Park. Blithe’s return home evokes memories of her lifelong sibling war with Noel, her golden-boy older brother, now a diplomat posted in England. But when Blithe befriends a lonely 11-year-old girl and takes on a local history project, she uncovers truths about a long-rumoured...
Desperately fleeing for his life, Brad Evans escapes Manhattan and hides in a trailer in the country. There he writes an expos of Phasmatia, the world’s first great Internet religion, and its megalomaniacal unholy messiah, Sky Fisher. As one of the trio of ad men who schemed to concoct Phasmatia, Evans certainly knows where all the skeletons are buried, and is ready to tellprovided he manages to live long enough. His close friend and co-conspirator, Stan Shiu, whose technical genius helped...
John Munin is a rational man, a gifted Montreal psychiatrist who believes that the soul and psyche are interesting only in dissection. Even relationships are ripe for analysis, and Munin has identified «six elements that are necessary for love.» His wife, Cynthia, an aspiring artist who paints only self-portraits, remains unconvinced taht love can be so quantified. More susceptible to Munin’s seraching analysis, though, is Penelope, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and is Munin’s...
Long-listed for the 2011 ReLit Awards Andrew Christiansen, a war photographer turned cabdriver, is having a bad year. His mother has just died; his father, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gets arrested; and he’s married to a woman he doesn’t love. To make matters worse, Sarah, the gifted actress from his past, storms back into his life, bringing with her a hurricane of changes and the possibility of happiness. Keeping Andrew sane is his beloved camera through which he captures the many...