Baraka Fiction

Bloody Sunday (1972) catapulted the Irish " troubles" onto the world stage, exacerbating suspicion in US intelligence circles that the IRA might turn to the Soviets for guns. South Boston native Raymond Daly, just off a CIA stint in Laos, is sent to Ireland to re-establish a line running guns to the IRA. He deftly earns the trust of gunrunner Slowey, a tough money-making South Boston native, who introduces him to an IRA splinter group operating near Blacklion, a town bordering on Northern Ireland. Ray begins to manipulate Aoife, an Irish woman, in order to gain the trust of the community and embed himself in the organization. After the British Special Air Services raid a safehouse, Ray finds himself involved in executing an informant and his wife. But he also finds himself getting soft on some of those he was sent to infiltrate and becoming more like his cover, " an Irish American gunrunner with a romantic attachment to the Cause," and less like an obedient CIA operative. Events spiral, culminating in a shootout with the British army that compels Ray to make a Faustian decision on his future and that of Aoife and the others he was assigned to manipulate. Inspired by complex, real-life political events with far-reaching consequences, Luke Beirne plays with and destabilizes the traditional spy tale. He also ponders the diabolic power invested in intelligence operatives.

Tess has just moved to Montreal from Nova Scotia, and seeks to lose herself by involving herself in the lives of others. She befriends an older man while delivering meals to the elderly. Her interest in his past veers into obsession after furtively going through his photos and letters and "borrowing" his journal. Though fact and fiction are blurred, they reveal a man shaken by political polarization and repression in his Latin-American homeland. Tess learns about a young, passionate man in the 1970s forced to reconcile his love for a militant young woman and his dedication to his best friend whose family is on the other side of the political divide. As she delves deeper into Mr. the man's story, she questions her own life choices, emotions, and obsessions. Exploring cultural and personal memory, Almost Visible reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person's life.

On a warm August evening in 1905, a 12-year old boy is shot in the back and killed near the Orford Mountain Railway construction site in rural Quebec. The crime is all the more shocking for being the second such murder on a railway in three days. A 14-year old had been killed in nearby Farnham very near an existing rail line. Like the murder in Farnham, the Orford Mountain Railway murder leaves the nearby communities in a state of shock and terror. The killing is puzzling in the extreme and while the police investigation eventually leads to an arrest, it soon becomes clear that the two suspects, while possibly guilty of other crimes, are definitely not the murderers. Fast forward a century to the moment the archivist of a local historical society comes across an unusual document. It is the diary of a teenage girl who chronicled the few weeks she spent with detested relatives near Melbourne Township in August 1905. More by accident than design, she provides clues that help the narrator investigate and solve the century-old case of the murder on the Orford Mountain Railway.

Questions surrounding his parents' deaths have haunted Noah Lamarck for almost thirty years. Now he copes with a grandfather suffering from dementia and an overwhelmed grandmother, the two people who raised him in Cape Breton. Money is tight and problems multiply. After relocating to Toronto to help his estranged wife care for their son, Noah is laid off from the Fisher Rare Book Library. Growing desperate, he seizes an unexpected lifeline. Noah and his friend, graduate student Cecelia Lines, agree to investigate new evidence of Shakespeare' s life for an eccentric bibliophile. But the more they delve into the playwright' s life, the more they are drawn into each other' s; and despite their growing feelings for one another, their divided loyalties leave them increasingly at odds and vulnerable to the manipulations of their employer. So unfolds a drama of love, sex, family histories, obsessions, and manipulations. Noah and Cecelia must navigate to save themselves, and Noah' s family, from ruin. From the Cape Breton seacoast to the streets of Toronto to 16th-century London, the past is always present in Full Fadom Five.

Chronicling the lives of a Balkan family, a people, a town and a nation, from dawn at the time of the first great War to dusk as the Cold War sputters to an end.

When Ishmael Reed wrote The Terrible Twos about the American infantile need for instant gratification, he could not have realized that in June 2020, journalist Nicole Wallace would be referring to a president as a "toddler." Reed had parodied other genres, the gothic novel, the detective novel, the western, and the neo-slave narrative, a term that he coined in 1984, and which began a big academic payroll as it was included in syllabi nation-wide. From his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Afro-Futurist before the critical term existed, Ishmael Reed has reshaped traditional forms and extended them. As a Jazz pianist, who has performed in clubs and even in a palace in Italy, he compares it to taking cliché chords and re-harmonizing them. The Terrible Fours follows The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989). It is part science fiction, part Washington Novel (Think Drew Pearson's novel, The Senator, films Seven Days In May and The Manchurian Candidate) and part Christmas Novel. Some characters have been dropped and some of the principals are back. St. Nicholas is here, but his sidekick Black Peter is missing. Dean Clift, the president who was removed from office, still resides in a Maryland sanatorium. Televangelist Clement Jones still runs the White House. "The Rapture" that Jones and the figurehead president Jesse Hatch promised hasn't arrived. The citizens of the planet Dido await an invasion from earth and their planet, an alien in the body of a deceased television producer, works inside the government and attempts to disrupt the invasion. Termite Control, a follower of Odin and a necrophiliac who was dismissed as a political threat in The Terrible Threes, is gaining in the polls, and more and more and more. Reviewing The Terrible Twos, the late John Leonard wrote in The New York Times: "Mr. Reed is as close as we are likely to get to a Garcia Marquez, elaborating his own mythology even as he trashes ours."

When Nicole Fortin whose goal is to be an Olympic swimmer sees her plan derailed, she goes to work for a jet engine manufacturer. The challenges are immense in the male-dominated workplace, but over the years she earns the respect of her fellow workers and leads them into a major labour dispute that could lead to a devastating dead end. Tangled workplace and family ties along with remarkable back stories add bite to this modern working class novel.

2020 Foreword Indies Winner, Gold, Adult General Fiction As a third-generation logger, a life in the bush is all Joe Adler has ever known. He works, he hunts; he provides. But when a man dies on his watch and his wife abandons their young family for writing school in Toronto, Joe must face the consequences of his hard-living ways. Left alone to care for his seven-year-old daughter, he enlists the help of Jenny Lacroix, the wife of the man whose death he might be responsible for. Resentful and angry, and his conscience over Jenny's husband far from clear, Joe threatens to spiral down the path of fury, booze, and violence that did his father in. What follows is a stunning tale of love and redemption, hatred and forgiveness, set amid the desolate cutovers, crystalline lakes, and rolling black spruce forests north of Lake Superior, and in a small logging town called Black River, once mighty and now derelict, in its final throes of existence. Things Worth Burying is a novel set in a region that is rarely written about-the small resource-based communities that exist along the Trans-Canada Highway and its tributaries, from Sault Ste. Marie to Thunder Bay, the land north of Superior, a land of miners and loggers living a life in the bush-making ends meet, and making do with the rise and fall of market economies that determine so much of their fate. Drawing upon his Northern Ontario upbringing, Mayr brings us a single story pulled from a working-class people who in the face of disappearing jobs and shrinking populations make the difficult choice to stay because the land, the life, is in their blood.

A haunting exploration of grief, marriage, and cultural identity.In Montreal, September 1991, Lydia and John Gabriel face the unimaginable: the stillbirth of their child. As they navigate the aftermath, their already fragile marriage comes under intense scrutiny, set against the backdrop of their differing cultural backgrounds. Lydia, the daughter of Greek immigrants, grapples with feelings of failure, while John confronts his own demons. Tunes for Dancing Bears delves into the complexities of loss, family dynamics, and the immigrant experience, asking: Can love and hope endure in the face of profound sorrow? This is a touching story for readers seeking emotionally resonant literary fiction.

A missing woman. A desperate search. A journey of self-discovery. Cate, a university professor in an unfulfilling marriage, finds her life upended when Nuna, the young Inuk woman she mentors, disappears. Cate and her magnetic new friend, Isabel, a paramedic, embark on a frantic search. Set in Montreal, Ottawa, and Nunavik, Looking for Her explores the intersecting lives of three women. As they navigate complex relationships and confront personal challenges, Cate must choose between her commitment to Nuna and her demanding husband. When the search reaches a critical impasse, Cate makes a life-altering decision: to stop living for others and embrace life on her own terms. For readers who enjoy character-driven stories with themes of cultural identity, female friendship, and the search for belonging.