When a mad dentist steals people's teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town. Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate. Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp's memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There's Miss Lamp's mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There's the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There's naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp's grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair – could it be love? These characters' stories weave together into a tangle – like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floral hotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else's shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.
Minor earthquakes every day; that's what they say. Lucy feels the tremors like a needle sensitized to respond to the slightest movement. She feels the push, the blind thrust of the earth's elastic body, pushing out, pulling in, behaving unpredictably. She lies awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of the tectonic plates moving against one another, building up tension, until something has to give.On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes. But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle – Vancouver, Montreal, the island – that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family. Part Egyptian myth, part Alice in Wonderland, How the Blessed Live is an ethereally quiet, unexpected debut from a novelist to be watched.
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour. Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever. Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. This is a remarkable novel: romantically and politically charged, utterly convincing in its portrait of our individual and societal instability, and steadfast in its faith in redemption.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris … This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. <br><br> Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel. ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic.’ – Anne Boyer ‘Robertson’s debut novel, for those interested in the possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed.’ – Publishers Weekly ‘A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal.’ – Los Angeles Review of Books
By the Giller Prize-winning author of Fifteen Dogs . A contemporary version of Gulliver’s Travels through a dreamscape version of small-town North America. Beautiful illustrations of plants both real and implausible.
"Though I had never met S.M. Stagwerth, it still felt as if I had stood there with Him atop all those train cars, beneath all those pitched tents, where curious congregants would gather momentarily and be swept away by His saline verbal prowess." – Mole Cricket Twelve-year-old Moses Cotton discovers dangerous mysteries, from a plague of field-mowing mole crickets to the long ago death of a fanatic evangelist named Stagwerth. Will Moses' persistence destroy his family, even the whole town? This is author Nick May's third writing adventure. He began with the folktale, Megabelt, and followed it with the thriller, Minutemen. He and his wife, Kayla, live along the Gulf Coast with their dog, Brother.
From a young age CeCe copes with her mother's crippling depression, their severe poverty, an absentee father, and her own insecurities. With gorgeous language, a vivid cast of characters, and an eye for poignant detail, Dasha Kelly tells the story of CeCe's struggle to break free from the grips of codependency and poverty to find confidence and success in her career and her personal life, finally becoming the strong woman she's always dreamed of being. CeCe couldn't remember when her mother became too weak to carry anything but tears. When the Sad started to come, pressing her mother to their bed, her Mama cried slick silent tears for a long, long time. Longer than a game of hopscotch. Longer than singing the alphabet in her head five times. Longer than a nap, even. The Sad made her mother cry all the time.