Prose

These darkly humorous stories contain richly illustrated characters whose interaction with the stories' ambiance creates a loaded sense of expectation. Twists and surprises abound as the players challenge the norms of their overbearing societies.

A taut psychological thriller, this novel explores the glamour of Hollywood and the dangers of role-playing. Liz is a budding actress waiting for her big debut when she is approached by Naomi Baum, the bestselling author and recluse, who asks Liz to impersonate her on the Ted Hillman Show. Also appearing on the program is Miro Bogdan, Naomi's abandoned son, and Naomi is desperate to make any contact with him she can. But when Ted Hillman falls in love with the stand-in Naomi and Miro plots her murder, it becomes unclear whether Liz still considers this a performance-or if she's living life as Naomi.

The accomplished stories found in this book take the reader from Cuba to the Yukon, from a parched landscape in Canada to the cool streets of southern Spain, from Toronto to the Rockies, and from the narrowing world of the dying to the wondrous expanse of a child's imagination. Uncannily adept at transporting his audience, Wade Bell's collection offers a satisfying depth of experience.

This offbeat story collection effortlessly captures dark underworlds and the eccentric characters that inhabit them. In one story, a jealous tattoo artist revenges himself on the woman he loves. In another, one horrifying realization after another comes to light during a harmless childhood game. Told with a Hitchcock-like flair for psychological detail, these disturbing stories reverberate with gruesome plot twists and remarkable turns of fate.

Tackling a common issue in new marriages, this novel focuses on a young couple's struggle to adjust in their first year as husband and wife. The characters, Mark Trecroci and Jennifer Drury, learn what it means to uncover the reality behind the love. Set in Ottawa, under the shadow of the parliament buildings, the couple experiences painful trials and sacrifices needed to achieve a working peace.

Images overrun the world. Toons filled with rage and hate hunger for life. A war between simulations and humans. People besieged in a castle of dreams. A mysterious knight shifts between worlds, holding the secret that could save all. Orphaned children lead him to the whirlwind, the terrible faceless source. B.W. Powe's stunning fable erases the lines between illusion and reality.

Len Gasparini is a master of the dark, hard-edged, densely layered story. In his latest story collection, The Snows of yesteryear, he charts the climate of the human heart with compassion, humor, nostalgia, and irony. His characters are shaped as much by fate as by the hungry ghosts of their own pasts. A desperate publisher dreams up a clever hoax to save his weekly newspaper from going under. Life and art are crucially juxtaposed when a painter sees his ideal model in a young black stripper. A cynical pensioner finds a new purpose in life when his lady friend adopts an ageing Siamese cat. Other stories are comic and nightmarish by turns.

In this novel from a Quebecois feminist writer, a shy sixteen-year-old falls in love with a classmate while attending a Catholic boarding school for prospective schoolteachers. When the fantasized relationship fails she takes superficial refuge with a group of girls recognizing her own loneliness and that of the group.

Set in New York, Tehran, Port-au-Prince, and Tegucigalpa, this psychological thriller explores themes of role-playing and paranoia while a fascinating story of two desperate men unfolds. One, a former intelligence contractor suffering from a mysterious ailment, has returned home to find an oblique message spelled out on his bedroom floor, while the other, a self-medicating paleontologist, has just discovered a 400-million-year-old cephalopod in the Moroccan desert. One of them will be liberated as the other is tangled in a web of suspicion, political intrigue, and scientific rivalry.

The two short stories in this collection are steeped in the revelries and tragedies of nostalgia. A woman living in war-torn Prague contemplates revenge against her oppressors but instead chooses to "sleep with the enemy." Both tales are set against a glimmering and dangerous Prague-populated by characters who are equally mysterious and beautiful.

Italians as indentured labourers in Southern cotton plantations at the turn of the 20th century? Entire families scrabbling to survive, dying of malaria, building relationships with their neighbours, many the first generation of freed slaves? Sweet Hope unleashes the little known story of Italians who came looking for a better life in La Terra Nuova and found hardship, misery and their own form of slavery instead.