Freehand

Award-winning writer Dora Dueck returns with five masterfully crafted stories about family tensions, misunderstandings, and Mennonite communities. A fourteen-year-old girl sees her soldier father's face for the first time. A group of "young old" women find community living together in a boxy modern house, until a mystifying event causes them to question what they thought they had. Decades after immigrating from Russia, a Mennonite woman comes to terms with a buried resentment from her past. In these five keenly observed stories, Dora Dueck fully inhabits the worlds of her characters, who encounter grief and misunderstanding but also tenderness and connection. With grace and insight, Like a River Divides the Earth explores the moments that divide us and the ways our lives are indelibly stitched together.

A moving, deeply honest account of great love and loss - this small book is a tender companion for those who are grieving. After "nine days in which we thought you would recover and then eight days in palliative care," Carol Matthew's husband of more than forty years passed away suddenly. Through the shock and grief that follows, Carol writes and writes, with love and anger and honesty and heartbreak, as she comes to an understanding of bereavement as not the end, but as a stage of married love. The owl of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings only at twilight. In Minerva's Owl, Carol Matthews finds solace in reflecting back on a marriage, a life, a person - in lyrical prose, in devastating honesty, and with hard-won insight. Structured in six sections - grieving, longing, belonging, mourning, cleaving, and surviving - Minerva's Owl offers not a step-by-step guide to grief, but an understanding companion to walk with the reader through dark days. Part grief memoir, part love story, this book is a gift for anyone who has lost someone they loved. This new second edition of the book provides a new epilogue that reflects on loss more than a decade later, and a new introduction from Maria Coffey, author of Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest.

Genre-bending and tinged with myth and folklore, these haunting debut stories centre young women at significant points in Lebanese history. A teenage girl mourns the death of her grandmother, only to feel her grandmother's spirit possessing her in a way that seems malicious. A family, struggling to make ends meet, receives an unexpected visitor, who has an awful proposal that may be impossible to refuse. A young girl worries that her brother is falling in with the wrong crowd, as civil war breaks out on the streets around them. The five stories in Tales of the Mountains and the Sea trace pivotal movements in modern Lebanese history and the effects they have on women. As she centres women and the choices that they make, Dania Idriss deftly weaves together history and folktales in a way that is both evocative and chilling. The Tales of the Mountains and the Sea is a startling and astonishing debut that navigates the intricate nuances of human experience, cultural identity, family history, and the lasting impacts of war.

In this striking debut novel, a young artist rashly moves overseas to teach ESL and to find herself, and gets more - and less - than she bargained for. It's the turn of the 21st century and Maggie is looking for reinvention. Fresh out of art school with - as her undergraduate advisor put it - a lack of vision for her future, Maggie follows a talented classmate to Japan, leaving behind a fractured family and a toxic relationship with her professor. Little does she know, not only her own life, but the entire world around her is about to change. Upon arrival in Japan, Maggie meets a group of maladjusted foreigners and immediately becomes enmeshed in their volatile friendships and personal dramas. Despite having no real qualifications whatsoever, she gets a job teaching English at Language Love Academy where she meets Keiko, an overzealous, middle-aged student and self-proclaimed language lover. When Keiko offers to teach Maggie Japanese, an unlikely friendship develops between them, and before long Keiko has become a ballast amid the disruptive forces in Maggie's life overseas. Have Maggie and her friends come to Japan to disappear or find themselves? Are their friendships and hook-ups real or just another illusion? Maggie struggles to discern whether she is sinking deeper into her hapless life abroad or gaining a foothold on a real future for herself. Welcome to Sunny Town is a striking, at times darkly satirical novel that cracks open a popular rite of passage, critically examining teaching overseas and the worldwide ESL industry. Bringing to mind the work of Elif Batumen, or Ottessa Moshfegh, Armstrong's debut novel paints a deft portrait of twenty-somethings yearning for identity, connection, and freedom abroad during the turbulent years of the early aughts.

Narrated in a completely distinctive and mesmerizing voice, Wan is the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline's carefully constructed life begins to unravel. Written in gorgeous and spare prose, this exquisite debut novel grapples with questions of complicity and guilt, of privilege, and of the immeasurable value of art and of life.

Navigating constantly changing social and familial relationships, the characters in M. Jay Smith's stories strive to hold everything together and stay true to their convictions in the process.Cantaloupe! brings us nine juicy stories about trying (and failing) to do the right thing - about yearning to stay true to yourself in a culture that demands compromise. With razor-sharp prose and a bit of slapstick humour, M. Jay Smith contemplates how identities smudge into each other, how they shout and push and wither and explode under pressure. These stories poke at the complexity of Indigeneity, gender, disability, and class. Childhood experiences exert a jagged and haunting influence on motherhood. The climate is collapsing. No matter what, it seems one's best intentions go a little bit awry.

A son's powerful and deeply moving examination of how six weeks of imprisonment in a concentration camp rippled through his father's life - and through his own life forever as well.When I Come Back We Will Talk is a book about the afterwards. Leonard Diepeveen explores his relationship with his father, beginning with his father's imprisonment as a boy during the winter of 1945 at Kamp Amersfoort, a Nazi concentration camp in the still-occupied Netherlands. In the eighty years that followed, the War would not let Len's father go, holding him and their family unrelentingly in its grip.Written with intense precision, in deeply moving vignettes, When I Come Back We Will Talk is at once acutely personal and highly observant. As one generation disappears, and their experiences and subsequent aftereffects become the fabric of future generations, Diepeveen's writing is as much a tender search to understand his father's life as a survivor and an immigrant as it is an mesmerizing examination of memory and self - and how to find meaning in the unspoken-but-ever-present realities that shape family histories.

These "cover stories" are bold new takes on classic short stories from the masters, brilliantly bringing together the old and the new.From bestselling novelist Wayne Grady comes the delightful and inventive The Cartel and Other Cover Stories, his first collection of short fiction. Just as cover songs are both tributes to other musicians and original works in themselves, here Grady masterfully reimagines classic short stories in a way that honours the originals while creating something entirely new.Each story in this collection takes its inspiration from works by international masters of the form, including Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Lydia Davis, drawing together new contexts and connections. For instance, in "La Gordita," inspired by Guy de Maupassant's "Boule de Suif" about the French bourgeoisie, Grady skewers wealthy expats in Mexico as they make arrangements to leave their winter homes when a drug cartel threatens to seize control of their town.Bringing together delectably stylish prose, striking characters, a foreword from Margaret Atwood, and "literary liner notes" that bring context to the original stories and the short story form, Wayne Grady's collection of cover stories is not to be missed!

A kinetic new poetry collection that sings our astonishment and our fear at how life makes and unmakes us through every love and every grief. These poems are at once plangent and wise, fired by exacting observation of the changes that mark the natural world-the diminishing woods, the surging birdsong in spring-as well as each stage of human life. The poet struggles to understand what her experiences mean, even as a sudden turn-a mother's illness, a father's death-sweeps her in an entirely different direction. Philips writes of "this borrowed ground," our trespass on the earth none of us can own. In every movement of these poems as they flow over rough ground and smooth, there's the thrill of discovery, and the echoing notes of what we can't know, the mystery of changes yet to come.

Over the course of one bitterly cold winter day in Yellowknife, Northern Bull takes readers on a joyful and hilarious journey of love and friendship as a quirky cast of characters sets out to find a missing moose head. It's a cold, dark January day in Yellowknife. A down-on-his-luck fisherman, Jacques, needs to convince his landlord not to tear down his ramshackle house. But when his volatile hunting buddy, Craig, accuses him of stealing a prized moose head, Jacques must put everything aside to find the bull before midnight, or there's no telling what Craig might do. Meanwhile, Jacques's next-door neighbour Maggie is trying to face her fears by writing a story for the annual community burlesque show. But when she accidentally breaks Jacques's window, she is determined to help save his home and find the moose head-and maybe something more. Over a single day, with flashbacks to the hunting trip that started it all and culminating in a wild night no one in Yellowknife will ever forget, we follow Jacques, Maggie and a quirky cast of supporting characters as they race against time-on snowmobiles-to find the moose, brave the stage, and take a chance on themselves and on love. A hilarious and charming ode to life in the north.

A road trip through the prairies prompts acclaimed writer Sharon Butala to unearth the stories of the natural world around her, and at the same time revisit her own personal histories.After an isolating and demoralizing year during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friend invites Sharon Butala to join her on a road trip - together they will drive the thirteen hundred kilometers from Calgary to Winnipeg, stopping as they please along the way. Sharon, relieved for a change of scenery, is keen to see again some of the locations that have been significant to her life on the prairies, including the ranch she lived on for thirty-three years with her husband before his death.But along the way, the sites they visit - landmarks of Indigenous history, sites where her ancestors struggled to eke out a living - prompt Sharon to unearth her own personal history. She sifts through memories of a difficult childhood, of traumas deeply buried, of relationships both complicated and gratifying. Taking stock of the people and places she has lost and left behind brings her to the ultimate confrontation - with mortality - which she explores with uncommon wisdom and frankness.Her most intimate work to date, Sharon Butala's How to Breathe Water is a love letter to the lands and waters of the prairies and a stirring exploration of the places and moments that mark and mold our lives.

"There was no point in telling Dorie that an education, even one in psychology, is no protection from the inherited mess with which we're let loose upon this life; that psychologists stumble and fall as hard, and with as much puzzlement, as anybody else."Growing up in rural Nova Scotia, Jen is a solitary and somewhat diabolical child who comes up with - at best - unusual ways of dealing with a life that never goes quite the way that she thinks it should. The linked stories of this collection follow Jen from childhood to middle age, jaunting through misadventures and marriages, learning all the while that while you can leave your hometown, your past still has a way of finding you.In prose rich in characterization and insight, That's Where You Were, Then explores the places we've been and the baffling absurdities we encounter along the way.

A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl's search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense. One forty-below December night, 18-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold with neighbours she hasn't yet met. The next morning, everything is off-kilter - the house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won't take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future. For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can't be trusted.

A queer coming-of-age story about a young man's journey from Canada to Serbia in search of his roots, about the power of truth and lies, and about the persistence of hope when there's nothing else left. Orphaned and stuck in a one-traffic-light prairie oil town, a young man yearns for a family to belong to and sets out to find his last known living relative, his estranged grandfather, somewhere in Serbia. Armed with nothing but his wit and resourcefulness, he starts his trek, from his hometown on the Canadian plains, across continents and countries, in search of acceptance and family, which he finds, but in the most unexpected people. We Are All of Us Left Behind is a queer coming-of-age story about the powers of truth and lies, of what a family really is, and the persistence of hope when there's nothing else left.

A novel about fatherhood, grief, unanswerable questions, and the small, magical moments that make up life.Keith has always striven to break rules as he navigates full-time parenting and supports the career of his successful photographer wife. Her unexpected illness and death leaves both him and his son Charlie in bits. When they take a road trip, a journey begins that does not end when they return home.Keith must deal with revelations that complicate his grief, even as Charlie's response is unsettling. Together, father and son connect with loved ones, strangers, and each other. Life's magical and mystical moments emerge. Is it enough to heal, though?

The first collection of short stories from award-winning author Tim Bowling, exploring childhood, work, and aging. Set on the west coast of British Columbia and in Edmonton, the fifteen stories in this collection focus on moments of transformation: between parents and their children, between men and women, between humans and the natural world. In this collection that's every bit as thoughtful and masterful as his past work, Tim Bowling explores the passing of time and the (sometimes desperate) desire for meaning to return, with depth and flashes of humour.

Debut stories about the absurdity of growing up and being human in the twenty-first century.A woman finds her childhood friend working in a booth at a psychic fair in the West Edmonton Mall courtyard. A lonely neuropsychology student steals cocaine from his lab rat to impress a Tinder date. Teenage girls play a dangerous game and discover a portal to another reality. These penetrating stories explore the strangeness and absurdity of being human in the twenty-first century: high school dances and teen pregnancy, bearded ladies and neighbourhood flashers, life coaches and Dolly Parton karaoke. Both unsettling and illuminating, Good Victory shines light in dark places.

Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary AwardFinalist for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel AwardWinner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book PrizeA powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war."An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war's physical and emotional derangements." - Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic. After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan - to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered. Drawn from the author's experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man's journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recovery.

A witty, layered and compelling novel about a woman with Down Syndrome, exploring textile art, sibling relationships, good intentions gone awry, and friendships.What is intellectual disability? Ask Bruno, who is at his wits' end trying to predict what his sister, Mina, will do next. Ask Iris, who is entranced by the wildly inventive embroidery Mina creates. Ask Gabriela, who loves Mina and disagrees when Bruno uses Mina's constant demands as an excuse not to have a child. Meet Mina in her overstuffed Montreal apartment, surrounded by her treasures. She knows she is the best paper sorter at the recycling plant where she works. She is proud to be diabetic but equally happy to cheat on her diet. The colours she stitches hum with life. Colours in Her Hands is a nuanced and thought-provoking novel about family, about art, about questioning the way the world treats those who are different. With an unforgettable voice, Mina navigates the labyrinth that society sets for her with dignity, inventiveness, and aplomb.

A risk-taking, labyrinthine, and absolutely original collection of short stories.Every Night I Dream I'm a Monk, Every Night I Dream I'm a Monster offers an unfolding puzzle of the human psyche that is at once explosive, funny, dark, sweet, pained, and utterly strange. From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky's narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future, with stories spanning from 1980s England to present-day Canada to visions of Renaissance France and a world yet to come.Each tale stands alone in its stylistic direction, only to connect and reflect back on each other in unexpected, touching, and sometimes jarring ways. As characters from different times and places converge, the result is a mosaic of emotions and insights that mirror the complexities of a self in time.With echoes of Chekhov, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jennifer Egan, this is a collection that transcends the boundaries of traditional storytelling, offering a glimpse into the workings of relationships, inheritance, and experience.

A memoir about abandoning an exhausting commuter lifestyle to move to a cabin in the woods, embracing imperfection while cultivating a life of care for self and nature.Alice Irene Whittaker was addicted to productivity, perfectionism, and discipline, making sure that every single moment of the day was accounted for. Then she finds herself as a new mother, commuting four hours a day into the city, exhausted by the state of the world, paralyzed by climate guilt and anxiety. Overnight, Alice Irene and her family decide to retreat to a cabin in the woods, in search of a new kind of life. Surrounded by creek, meadow, and forest, Alice Irene begins a new lifelong journey of repairing her fractured relationship with both herself and the natural world. Her quest takes her to meet a renowned economist-rancher in Colorado, to stand at the side of a runway at a sustainable fashion show in Portland, and to witness firsthand rewilding of wolves in Yellowstone. She interviews and learns from dozens of people who are building homes, growing food, making clothes, raising families, and living their lives in regenerative ways. Searching for the spaces between the sorrow of wildfires and the beauty of wildflowers, Homing is a lyrical memoir about moving from a life of despair to a life of care.

A powerful debut about the lives of women and girls caught in the orbit of the military.Female recruits weathering toxic masculine environments. Military wives stretched thin across countless military moves, new cities and new selves. Military kids whose mercurial friendships flare and fade to the rhythm of their parent's career path. Throughout, this collection introduces us to characters who trespass beyond the boundaries of their own realities to discover who they are within someone else's narrative.Sara Power writes with insight and emotional precision about what it's like to be unmoored. Art of Camouflage is memorable at every turn, full of characters whose deepest motivations we recognize intrinsically as our own.

Rose Drury and her partner, Lucy, have just learned that their son, Roger, is considered to be below average - at the third percentile rank in most areas, according to the pediatrician. Although Rose herself is a developmental psychologist and knows all of the "right" answers and "correct" things to do, she finds that she is all too human, struggling with the opinions, social pressures and off-handed cruelty that can beset the mother of a child who is different. With humour and desperation in equal measure, Rose sifts through her life history, looking for the definitive moment that could explain how she and her son got to this point. In this sparkling and empathetic novel, Marion Douglas digs into a young mother's uncertainty, fear, and hard-won wisdom as she and her son - an odd and loveable giant of unpredictability - forge a path forward together.

Set in Paris, an offbeat and sweet novel about family, loss and recovery, and the magic of memory.When Mira takes a trip to Paris with her nephew, Bernard, she expects to ride bicycles through the picturesque streets and admire the parks and courtyards. But the trip takes a different turn when the two travellers try to rescue an injured pigeon from the sidewalk, and their journey becomes one of addressing the losses that define their lives.Mira is recently divorced and facing a childless (or is it child-free?) future; Bernard has lost his first love and is grappling with his responsibility in the relationship's demise. Both are living in the shadows of war, immigration, and family disconnection as they prepare to travel on to Croatia, the country Mira left behind during the Yugoslav Wars.But for now: Paris. Mira and Bernard move through a city that feels both familiar and strange -- this is not merely the Paris of postcards, but a Paris of dubious one-star hotels and immigrants and labourers and taxi drivers and Eiffel Tower trinket vendors. And yet it's still a city that possesses an undeniable magic, where one might glimpse intriguing strangers or stumble upon past lovers.Thoughtful and witty, The Harvesters is infused with subtle beauty and the magic of memory.

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman's journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home.In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen's relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah's previous inhabitants, and Owen's triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond -- though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.

"Extraordinary -- and totally engrossing. Lásko is at once an intimate tale of personal awakening, a love story, and a provocative parable about the lures and dangers of influence." JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, author of IslandWhen Mája was seven, her mother disappeared. Now Mája has an overwhelming urge to do the same. She leaves her fiancé in Canada and follows signs that she believes are leading her to the Czech Republic, her mother's home country.In Prague, she falls in love with Kuba, a charismatic musician who is a rising star in Czech New Age circles. As she navigates this irresistible and overwhelming relationship, Mája is guided by dreams, visions, and synchronicities, but she also suffers from a mysterious illness and the unshakeable sense that something is terribly wrong.Revealing both the falseness and truth of the stories we tell ourselves, Catherine Cooper's novel is sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately moving -- a profound meditation on the pain and potency of love.

Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fictionThese are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told 'round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.G.A. Grisenthwaite's writing is electric and inimitable, blending meticulous literary style with oral storytelling and coming away with a voice that is entirely his own. Tales for Late Night Bonfires is truly one of a kind, and not to be missed.

"One day, not long ago, I was kidnapped by a bitter but fun-loving South Korean art collector named Mr. Jackie Lin who had been burned one too many times by art forgers and wanted a bit of revenge." So begins The Abduction of Seven Forgers, a brilliant and immensely entertaining novel with a colourful and unforgettable cast of characters. A group of artists are brought together under mysterious circumstances to a leafy London suburb. Once there, they are taken hostage by Mr. Lin, an angry art collector who demands that they create original works that will replace the forgeries he has obtained from each of them in the past. Over the following days, the hostages discover that a twelve-year-old boy is hiding in crawl spaces behind the walls, and they agree to continue to keep him hidden from Mr. Lin. But things become immensely more complicated once Mr. Lin's daughter appears, purportedly to learn from the forgers -- there may be more to Mr. Lin's artistic plan than first meets the eye. With dazzling inventiveness, Sean Dixon explores the power of art, both in its creation and its acquisition, and creates a vivid world where artworks can -- and do -- come to life. The Abduction of Seven Forgers brings together the artistic obsession of The Goldfinch, the stakes of Bel Canto, and the intelligent imagination demonstrated by Yann Martel and David Mitchell, with a flair that is all Sean Dixon's own.

A stunning memoir of coming of age and recovering from anorexia in the 2020s Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society's constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.In 2020, fourteen-year-old Charlotte's lifelong drive to achieve 'perfection' distorts into an all-encompassing obsession. Living between the suffocating world of lockdown and an uncanny dreamscape inhabited by competing avatars, Charlotte faces a parade of masked faces in hospital rooms, the aftermath of first love, the erosion of lifelong friendship, and the agony of seeing her illness devastate her family as it threatens to destroy her; as the world reopens, she finds new connections and mentors, new joy, new ways of thinking, new ways to be.Charlotte Bellows offers a potent fusion of insight and innocence -- a story for those who suffer or have suffered from eating disorders, but, more, a vital coming of age story of a young gay and artistic woman, tugged and throttled by a myriad of pressures, not least from the dark gravity that is the underside of her own creative drive.

A diverse group of seven writers comes together to create seven tender scenes about their hopes for the future."The seven of us, a diverse group of elders, have endured, loved, lost and celebrated life in our own ways. Now, we decided, we would write a production for the stage, voicing our different experiences and what we came to realize are similar concerns about the future of our families, our planet, its peoples and its incredible network of flora and fauna."The Many Mothers Collective came together during the pandemic, hoping to make sense of the world that they found themselves in. What they found is that they needed to focus not only on the present moment, but on the world they would leave for their children and grandchildren -- and for seven generations into the future. In seven scenes for the stage, they explore where we have come from and where we are going, with a deep hopefulness rooted in resistance.

A finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour -- a witty and immensely fun dramedy about a family's memorial trip to the City of Love, where chaos ensues at every turn. It's been ten years since Claudia's mother died after a tragic collision with a banana boat. Her kids are now teenagers, her brother's wife has left him, and her ex has had a spiritual awakening that has him hinting at reconciliation -- all things she can handle. But when her septuagenarian father decides to remarry after a brief courtship with a woman who is decidedly different than their mother, the entire family is thrown off course, and plans a long overdue memorial trip to the only place their mother ever dreamed of going: Paris. However, minutes after take-off, the trip takes an unpredictable turn and sets off a chain of events that threatens to derail the closure the family desperately seeks. Chance meetings, poolside confessions, run-ins with mimes, climate protests, and a man with a death wish force Claudia to reconsider everything she thought she knew about love, both the familial and the romantic, the tragic and the sublime. How well do we really know those closest to us? And how well do we really know ourselves? In this follow-up to her award-winning novel Roost, Ali Bryan explores thorny family dynamics with her trademark offbeat humour and insight. Coq is a darkly comedic contemporary family drama that explores grief, identity, and second chances in the one-and-only City of Love.

End Times is an astounding debut collection of stories about evangelical culture, ideological polarization, and the messiness and mysteries of humanity.A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant tries to help a rural fundamentalist teen, while her own secular life unravels in Toronto, Davos, and beyond. An atheist doctor attempts to expose a hipster megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite.At a time when the end feels nigh for many, End Times brings together an expansive cast of the devout and the dissenting, the elderly and the young, immigrants, elites, the burned-out, and the lonely, exploring our hidden anxieties and longings.