Tilting Towards Joy is a collection of interconnected stories that trace the delicate threads binding lives across continents and through time. Set against the backdrop of rural France, each story follows familiar characters through unfamiliar terrain, offering insight into how we navigate new experiences, unexpected conflicts, and shifting relationships.Among the characters we meet are an empty-nest couple who trade their Edmonton home for a farmhouse in rural France; a young girl who exacts revenge on her siblings by serving an unconventional "dessert"; a woman who after being scammed chooses to view the situation with hope rather than pessimism; visiting friends who show their true colours; and siblings hurriedly preparing for a wildfire evacuation. Each story, grounded in a moment of personal reckoning, pulses with a sense of yearning -- tilting always toward the possibility of joy, even as it remains just out of reach.

A small-town Bill Clinton look-alike agonizes over whether to accept a tempting offer from the CIA; an obese young woman finds love in a prairie cafe; a lonely child encounters a supernatural being; a teenage girl struggles with a sexual predator as she hitchhikes on the autobahn; a newly divorced man tries to return his adopted children; two brothers and a sister take their father's ashes back to the North, trying to make it over the ice road before break-up. These are just a few of the stories from Margaret Macpherson's remarkable debut collection, Perilous Departures. Perilous though they may be, all of these stories represent a departure from the ordinary and all celebrate the chaotic splendour of life. Each story, in its individuality, illuminates the path that leads to home, but home isn't always what we expect, and paths in Macpherson's world are rarely straight and narrow.With compelling exuberance, Margaret Macpherson entices her readers to leave behind their familiar comforts and join her on a unpredictable journey of hazardous navigations. In Perilous Departures, the risks are many, the rewards transformative.

A yellowed newspaper clipping about a recently released prisoner who has saved a drowning boy triggers a wrenching journey into memory for middle-aged Ruth Callis, forcing her to confront the events of her past and, ultimately, her own act of forgiveness.Growing up in the far North, Ruth is attracted to the young missionaries working in her town and becomes increasingly involved in the activities of their evangelical fundamentalist church group. Much to the dismay of her long-suffering parents, she turns into an adolescent zealot.When Ruth moves south to go to university, life becomes less simple, answers less obvious. She becomes involved with Ian, an older man who is unemployed, alcoholic, obsessive, and increasingly volatile. What at first seems exotic becomes more and more frightening. The devastating relationship forces Ruth to re-examine her own twisted ideologies.A book of rare emotional honesty, Released reveals the selfishness of the so-called righteous, the intense cruelty of human beings, and their divine capability for real love.

Body Trade weaves together two stories of survival. The main narrative follows Rosie and Tanya, two young Canadian women who decide to leave the Northwest Territories and head south on an ill-conceived road trip through California, Mexico and Central America. The story takes a life-defining twist when their search for freedom and adventure brings them into contact with predators of the Central American sex trafficking trade. The girls' journey into unknown and dangerous territory is punctuated with scenes from a plane crash in the far North, underlining the novel's themes of survival, betrayal, epiphany and hope. In a deeply personal narrative that explores power, sexual manipulation, cultural consumption and trust, Body Trade asks the ultimate question: To what terrifying places will we journey, and at what cost, in order to save our own lives?