Essential Prose
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A Good Name
by Yejide Kilanko
Part of the Essential Prose series
Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn't one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.
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The Morelli Thing
by Frank Lentricchia
Part of the Essential Prose series
The unsolved murder of Fred Morelli, in Utica, New York, in 1947, comes to the fore more than 60 years later when 15-year-old Angel, hacker extraordinaire, has his guitar smashed by Victor Bocca, one of the original suspects in the murder. Angel hacks files that may point not only to Bocca's involvement but also that of the mob. From there, mayhem breaks loose as assassins descend on Utica to silence Angel. In the midst of it is Angel's adoptive father, Eliot Conte, who, along with his close friend Police Chief Antonio Robinson, must try to unravel the mystery of what is going on before more killings take place, including that of Angel himself.
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Darkness at the Edge of Town
by Stan Rogal
Part of the Essential Prose series
A ghostly tale of family ties and madness.
A young man, Ray, returns to where he was born, Weyburn, SK, after several years traveling anonymously around the country. He's recently been suffering from frightening nightmares and he feels they may have something to do with his past, especially within the walls of the abandoned former mental asylum where his father had worked and his mother had been a patient. Old loves, old wounds and old grievances are rekindled, made especially difficult by the fact that his brother is the town sheriff and is also married to Ray's former girlfriend. The presence of an older, mute, indigenous woman adds to the mystery
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Holy Fools & Other Stories
by Marianne Ackerman
Part of the Essential Prose series
In the novella, Holy Fools, a man on the verge of suicide answers the doorbell and is arrested for a crime he did not commit. His luck changes when he meets Tolstoy, a Lord and author of long books who is doing time for crimes against shareholders. A dark comedy about the game of life. Two stories complete the collection: Nobody Writes to the Professor and Albert Fine.
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Magnetic Dogs
by Bruce Meyer
Part of the Essential Prose series
Magnetic Dogs is a collection of short stories that examines how displaced individuals – those who have been snatched out of their time and place – struggle to adapt and reinvent themselves in an entirely new context or re-establish themselves in their former situations. In stories that are factual fiction, Meyer examines the composition of Gabriel Fauré's haunting "Cantique de Jean Racine," the 1960s 'scoop' of Indigenous children from Manitoulin Island, the missing diaries of Lewis Carroll that save that author from the charges of child molestation that ruined his career as an academic, the true story of a shade of red and Seventh Century Chinese exploration of the North Atlantic, and the origins and ramifications of a haunting Aztec form of music, borrowed by J.S. Bach, the 'chaconne.' In these stories Meyer constantly questions the ways our perceptions of the past might have been different had small events transpired to make them so.
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I'll Be
by Claudio Gaudio
Part of the Essential Prose series
At the heart of I'll Be resides a highly unreliable narrator. As he fumbles through his days, he breaks boundaries that are larger than the seemingly insignificant tasks at hand: the concept of space is uncertain, language is broken, history is rewritten, identity itself remains a question. The futility of language is a theme that surfaces continually. In a commentary on the nature of political systems, for example, the narrator points out its inadequacy in facilitating truthful communication: "To be fair, this country is safe, no one I know has fallen from a sniper's rifle, and not since 1970 have tanks roamed the streets. But that was in another province, another language, so it may not have happened." Between sentences strife with comma splices, existentialist questions, and other deconstructionist strategies, the novel is peppered with poetic metaphor and laugh-out-loud humor that is sometimes dark, and always searching. By working to unravel every strand of our understanding of the external world, the novel, in turn, reveals the frailty of our thought process, inner constitution, and essentially our humanity.
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Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness
by Danila Botha
Part of the Essential Prose series
Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old (Born, Not Made) to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways (Blasting Molly Rockets), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother's wish to protect her sister (Able to Pass) to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank (Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish), these stories pulse with Botha's signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity (Soulmates) to those who hold on at all costs (Dark and Lilac Fairies). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.
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Love and Rain
by Carmela Circelli
Part of the Essential Prose series
Love and Rain is a novel whichexplores the nature of love, its pain, and the near impossibility of its enduring happiness. Moving back in space and time from Rome to Montreal in the sixties and seventies, it also traces the individual rebellion and social revolution that marked the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy in the late 1970s. The power of love, music and politics intertwine in a tale that the spells the mysterious alchemy of fate and chance.
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Thieves Never Steal in the Rain
by Marisa Labozzetta
Part of the Essential Prose series
Grappling with her daughter's fatal accident, Joanna finds solace in the conviction that her daughter lives on in the body of another child. Nancy's decision to lose a kidney in order to save her husband's life jeopardizes her last chance for motherhood. All that Barbara possesses and identifies with, including companionship with a ghost, vanishes overnight. Angie takes a drastic measure to lose weight in order to regain her confidence and self esteem. Rosemary, a renowned "agony aunt," falls apart when her husband leaves her, only to find comfort in the strangest of strangers. Love and the supernatural drive these stories about the intertwining lives of five female cousins, who learn that loss-from misplacing keys to confronting death-is a constant force.
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Dead Voices
by F. G. Paci
Part of the Essential Prose series
Dead Voices is a collection of stories that are both seriously realistic and comically whimsical. They have everything from superheroes who get sick on words, to the appearance of dead playwrights, to the visit of saints and sinners from the past, to a hot stove discussion on hockey and love. They're about the modern mind-set and its technological marvels and the older attention to character and virtue.
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Cut Road
by Brent van Staalduinen
Part of the Essential Prose series
A rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories.
Containing a rich mix of acclaimed and award-winning stories, Cut Road is a masterful exploration of the loss and scars that conflict always leaves behind. Where soldiers abandon too much of themselves in war zones, parents relinquish control of their children, and friends struggle with change and tragedy. From the working soul struggling with grief to the wounded veteran seeking redemption in a coffee shop to the sweaty tree-planter fleeing a burning forest, in this collection no one-least of all the reader-is left unscathed.
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Notes of a Mediocre Man
Stories Of India And America
by Bipin Aurora
Part of the Essential Prose series
Two brothers come to school and do nothing but tell stories. A man goes to a singles dance. A retired man in India tries to collect his pension. A woman tells the story of her husband's death in partition India. An unnamed narrator offers his "notes" on modern-day America, the culture of success. Some of the stories are set in India, some in America. Some stories are fable-like, others more realistic. Some deal with sex, some are "intellectual" stories. But all stories deal, in one way or another, with small, "mediocre" people, people trying to fit into a world of bigness, applause, success.
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Momma's Got the Blues
by David Sherman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Celebrating the joys of pop music and the musicians who live to play it; while taking an insider's look at what the digital age has done to the artist, the business and the sound.
The golden days of MaryAnne's singing career, of sold-out concert halls and hit records have given way to shabby rooms and paltry CD sales, battered by YouTube and streaming. But, MaryAnne, nearing 60, refuses to retire. When her party-animal single daughter becomes pregnant, MaryAnne rebels against becoming a grandmother and putting her dwindling career aside to help her daughter raise an infant. It's left to her live-in lover to try and sew the family back together while MaryAnne clutches her six-string for dear life.
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Winners and Losers
Tales Of Life, Law, Love And Loss
by Darlene Madott
Part of the Essential Prose series
Winners And Losers: Tales of Life, Law, Love and Loss is a collection of linked short stories that turns a dazzling searchlight on the inner workings of the legal profession, told from the viewpoint of a feisty narrator finding her way through a hostile and competitive law environment. By the end, the reader will have undergone a sprawling journey through a lifetime in practice, where the pit-bull litigator is tenderized through the clients, the work, the failure of her own marriage, by single mothering. Because the protagonist doesn't judge, because she lays out the evidence in her search for the truth in a circling, coyote-like fashion, the reader lives that tracking inquiry along with her.
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Immortal Water
by Norman Brian Van
Part of the Essential Prose series
Immortal Water offers a unique portrayal of the very human fear of ageing. The novel depicts two men from two time periods: the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the 16th Century and a retired teacher named Ross Porter in contemporary times, both in the midst of life altering crises. Inside parallel plots the two men form an obsession with a quixotic search for the mythical fountain of youth. The protagonists sparkle into fullness as each is depicted in his struggle to remain vital while age slowly steals his significance away.
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Waiting for Stalin to Die
by Irene Guilford
Part of the Essential Prose series
Fleeing Stalin's advance into Lithuania, shaken by communism and war, four refugees end up in Toronto in 1949. Vytas, a young doctor who gets into medical school by saving a child's life, is haunted by a lost love. Maryte, a seamstress whose affair with a German officer saved her half-witted brother, struggles to take care of him. Justine, a concert pianist raped during the war, strives to regain her ability to make music. Father Geras, an illegitimate child steered into the priesthood by family, finds purpose in guiding his exiled people. Trying to resume normal lives, longing for their country's freedom, they wait to go home.
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Wordwings
by Sydelle Pearl
Part of the Essential Prose series
In 1941, 12-year-old Rivka Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto with her grandfather and two sisters in a synagogue because housing is scarce. When German soldiers slash her grandfather's beard, Rivka is compelled to write in between the pages of a library book by Hans Christian Andersen. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Underground Archive--a compilation of Warsaw Ghetto experiences, asks her to contribute her stories to the archives and Rivka agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings of their own.
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Kaidenberg's Best Sons
A Novel In Stories
by Jason Heit
Part of the Essential Prose series
Kaidenberg's Best Sons is an enthralling portrait of a community starting over in a new land. In a series of linked stories, author Jason Heit explores the lives and fortunes of people bound together by tradition, heritage, and history, yet riven by envy, greed, and lust. When a community of Eastern European settlers in North Dakota learn that there is promising farmland available in the newly established province of Saskatchewan, they load their wagons and head north. Along with their furnishings, they also pack up their resentments, desires, and ambitions and bring them to a new, unsettled land. Heit deftly captures both the promise of a new start in a new land and the long shadow of the past that is cast over the characters as they rebuild their lives.
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Walking Leonard
And Other Stories
by Sophie Stocking
Part of the Essential Prose series
Walking Leonard and Other Stories, is a short story collection of roughly 30,000 words in the literary fiction genre. The stories depict unspoken pivot points in the lives of ordinary people. Themes include responsibility and violation between parent and child, nature as a protective force, and the shucking off of various selves in the process of a lifetime. The stories spring from the foothills of southern Alberta, specifically Calgary, and some even more specifically from the historic neighborhood of Bowness, once a small town in its own right.
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Mouth of Truth
Buried Secrets
by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz
Part of the Essential Prose series
Mouth of Truth is the unique story of a woman trapped in the vault of family secrets, part of her still a hidden child, some 40 years after the Second World War. Following a crisis, she leaves her home and children in search of the truth about her beloved father, a Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story reveals how unhealed childhood trauma of a parent can be transmitted from one generation to the next, destroying families and other relationships in its wake.
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Against the Machine
Luddites
by Brian Van Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
At war against Napoleon near bankrupt English mill-masters experiment with a new factory system acquiring machines to replace men. A young worker leads the Luddites attacking mills and smashing machines. With increased assaults and even murder North England feels the grip of terrorism. Government agents attempt to suppress the rebellion. In 1812 there are more British troops in North England than fighting Napoleon in Europe. Against the Machine relates the story of the diverse characters caught in this conflict. It unveils the rank exploitation which marked the Industrial Revolution.
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A Boy at the Edge of the World
by David Kingston Yeh
Part of the Essential Prose series
Meet the Garneau boys, triplets from small-town Ontario. Daniel the "eldest" is gay, and moves to Toronto with his best friend Karen to attend university. Eventually, he meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance artist whose grandfather was a book-burning Nazi. A Boy at the Edge of the World is a rollicking dramedy that explores the compulsive and (ultimately) universal human pursuit of intimacy, sex, and love.
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Radius Islamicus
by Julian Samuel
Part of the Essential Prose series
Joseph, the tactician behind the Piccadilly Circus bombing, finds himself in a nursing home in Pierrefonds, Quebec. A visit from a long-lost former fellow cell member interrupts his dalliance with the night nurse, provoking both a crisis and a period of reflection. Did he lose his mind back then as a young man? Or is he losing it now? Why did a systems analyst living on the Kandahar Road in London, with a PhD from the London School of Economics and an enthusiasm for Bobby Darin's hit "Dream Lover" (the Farsi version), bring home fertilizer? Will his former associates give him up with deathbed confessions?
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Raccoon
A Wondertale
by Sean Kane
Part of the Essential Prose series
The dream of an urban paradise comes true for the Raccoons of a small suburban city when they rise up, throw out their government, and create an ecological commonwealth. Touchwit, Clutch and Bandit are prepared to die for a free, healthy, and diverse city. But to earn their self-respect as citizens they must overcome their father Meatbreath, an autocrat obsessed with multiplying himself in a host of weaponised children. And to join a community of kinship they must find their future mates. Will the three cubs use the powers they have inherited from their father without being claimed by his evil? In this sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic adventure story full of echoes of current issues and political personalities, Raccoons are the leading experts at survival, engaging the struggle for a better Earth with wonder, joy, and laughter.
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Faithful and Other Stories
by Daniel Karasik
Part of the Essential Prose series
A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.
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In Pursuit of Truth
by Joseph V. Ricapito
Part of the Essential Prose series
In this satirical take on the goings on in the halls of academia, Christian private-college style, Ricapito tells the story of Bert Russo, a naive professor who learns the hard way that making waves (especially political ones) can lead to dire consequences. In the end, having exposed the hypocrisy and two-faced actions of his colleagues and having lost both his wife and job, Bert is finally at peace with himself.
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Zoo and Crowbar
by David Zieroth
Part of the Essential Prose series
The Wind has mysteriously caused the death of all people on earth-except for Zoo. As the last remaining person on earth, he must deal with this extraordinary situation, and the result is a series of dreams, shocks, hallucinations, events, explorations and the final outcome in the light of his changing understanding.
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The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness
by Jerry Levy
Part of the Essential Prose series
To fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn in her arsonist brother, a failed writer whose fictional character suddenly comes to life, an unhappy insurance examiner who discovers a fallen angel and decides to cash in on his find, or a successful, middle-class man who pines for the poet he once was, nothing is sacred in this collection of stories. Myth and imagination hold equal weight, authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand, and the lines between reality and illusion blur. Characters find themselves trapped, or at least, incapable of restoring their humanity. It may be sobering to observe such forays into darkness but underlying their failures is a tacit suggestion that perhaps they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or simply with some encouragement. And some do; amidst the carnage of those who fail and disappear emerge some who acquire new strength to reconnect with the world.
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Land for Fatimah
by Veena Gokhale
Part of the Essential Prose series
Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali's kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel. In Land for Fatimah, Anjali involves herself in Fatimah's quest to find new land for her scattered community, and is thrown into a web of intrigue that upturns her safe, orderly world. Capturing the warmth and vitality of Africa, illuminating everyday heroism, the novel explores expat life, the forced displacement of the poor and the complexities of development.
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Against the Machine
Evolution
by Brian Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.
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Sometimes It Snows in America
by Marisa Labozzetta
Part of the Essential Prose series
Combining fable, story telling and the grubbiness of harsh reality, Marisa Labozzetta tells the story of Fatma, a young woman from a storied family in Somalia. Brought to the United States as part of an arranged marriage, Fatma must undergo losing her child, drug addiction, abuse and prison before coming out the other side. A tale of someone who never gives up, no matter how bleak her prospects. A novel that allows hope to shine even in the darkest hour.
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Where Seas and Fables Meet
Parables, Fragments, Lines, Thought
by B. W. Powe
Part of the Essential Prose series
A book that is an open door, a current, an open window, a breeze over uncut grass, a dance of morning light on an old ruined sundial, a set of waves flowing up on a strange shore. This is a book that asks why do we give in to the psychotic and invasive Structure (and its many names)? A book that mingles witticisms and provocations so that the reader may settle into his or her soul and reflect. A book that works in associations, echoes, pulses, images, returns, vibrations, thought-experiments, dreams, visions and revisions. This is a book that should have an ellipse on the front page with an image of a shock of light
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The Beautiful West & the Beloved of God
by Michael Springate
Part of the Essential Prose series
In the spring of 2008 Elena, who recently moved to Montreal with her seven year old daughter, Sharon, finds a job in a retail store on Sherbrooke Street. She meets Mahfouz working in his family's fast food outlet on The Main. Partially as an antidote to her chronic loneliness, partially influenced by Sharon's spontaneous affection for him, Elena commits to a deepening relationship. Together the three of them enjoy a wonderful spring. That summer, however, Mahfouz doesn't return from a visit to Cairo, and his father is picked up and held indefinitely for unknown charges on undisclosed evidence. Elena and Mahfouz, no longer in any contact with each other, must separately come to terms with their historical situation, and prepare for a future shaped by forces they struggle to understand.
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The B-Side of Daniel Garneau
by David Kingston Yeh
Part of the Essential Prose series
The B-Side of Daniel Garneau concludes a rollicking three-book series set in Toronto featuring the misadventures of boyfriends Daniel and David, their eccentric family and friends. As Daniel prepares to graduate from med school and propose marriage, David sets out to donate his sperm so his brother can have a baby. But as his celebrity ex, Marcus, launches his boldest exhibit yet, an unexpected crisis forces Daniel to re-evaluate his priorities in life.
The B-Side of Daniel Garneau is the inspirational follow-up to A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018) and Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020). At turns both comic and tragic, it is a celebration of queer identities and non-traditional families, as Daniel struggles to discover himself and his path in the world. At its heart, it is a philosophical reflection on acceptance and living with courage and love.
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Stone Woman
by Bianca Lakoseljac
Part of the Essential Prose series
Stone Woman is a saga of Blossom's unconventional family of five women, whose lives are bound by a Vietnam-War draft dodger David, immersed in the Yorkville subculture of the hippie daze of Toronto. During the 1967 Art Symposium, a giant block of marble intended for a sculpture disappears from High Park, and the mystery of the theft becomes the focus of speculation in the Toronto arts community. The novel draws the reader into a web of liaisons?into David?s love affair with Blossom?s mother Liza, his covert dealings with her friend Anna, as well as the mysterious Helena. The intrigue culminates in the convergence of their loves and tragedies, and quests for social and cultural change inherent in the tumultuous milieu of the period. The story is brought to the present through the lives of the women?s daughters who discover that their family secrets have been sculpted literally into an art form that imparts a sense of homecoming and alludes to a more hopeful future.
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Tracie's Revenge & Other Stories
by Wade Bell
Part of the Essential Prose series
In this stunning book, Wade Bell writes on the level of Raymond Carver and Roberto Bolano. He knows exactly what to leave out to make a short story great. This is a book everyone who loves great fiction and short stories will want to read. He is the master of endings and like Alice Munro keeps us guessing until the final sentence. These are stories to dwell on and ravish in. Read just one and you will be hooked! - Robert Hilles (Author of A Gradual Ruin and Partake).
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Unca Dave's Wilderness
by David Sapin
Part of the Essential Prose series
Adversity is a sweet gift wrapped in soiled newsprint. Pain is a reminder that we are still alive. Anxiety is fear of tomorrow, and guilt is fear of yesterday. At the bottom end, it's about scrutinizing the tiny stuff that nobody cares about. Rocks, dead leaves, dirt, lint, dust, bugs, mice, and pocket change. At the top end, it's about the miracle of life itself, of being alive and being surrounded by amazing, surprising, astounding living things. Both ends get seriously taken for granted. We live our lives in the safe middle ground, midway between the micro and the macro. Unca Dave's Wilderness let's us take a moment to ponder on how ducks learn how to count, or why trees talk to each other, or how a repulsive worm can become a butterfly. And how we, lowly humans, can also metamorphize.
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The Light of the Soul
Neruda, The White Raven, The Black Cat
by Pietro Corsi
Part of the Essential Prose series
Beginning with dangerous thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped from the mind of the protagonist who returns and sees his old hometown as it once was. Additionally, there is the suffering caused by migration. Like the hunter who, after a few years of living in Canada, returns home to enjoy the fruit of a pension - and realizes the reality that awaits him is no longer his reality. In a moment of despair, he goes into the woods and takes his own life.
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The Mezzogiorno Social Club
by Ercole Gaudioso
Part of the Essential Prose series
From Black Hand criminals to stand-up cops, from innocent victims and ordinary people to schemers and dreamers: a novel that chronicles one hundred years in the lives and relationships of those who have lived in New York City's Little Italy. A multi-generational, multi-dimensional tale that digs deep into the minds and hearts of this vibrant neighborhood.
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A Voluntary Crucifixion
by David MacKinnon
Part of the Essential Prose series
A Voluntary Crucifixion traces the story of 20th century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J MacKinnon?s life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society -from the bottom up. A Voluntary Crucifixion recounts the tale of MacKinnon's adventures and misadventures from post-Tiananmen Hong Kong to various ports of call in the Indian Ocean, offering MacKinnon's views on everything from censorship to indigenous issues, all of which reflect his life ethos that the key to life is to refuse to adapt, and to fight tooth-and-nail for every square inch of your freedom before others wrench it from you.
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The Family Code
by Wayne Ng
Part of the Essential Prose series
Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free-or else lose everything.
Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope.
With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.
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The Goat in the Tree
by Lorne Elliott
Part of the Essential Prose series
Against the backdrop of Morocco and France, the hero of The Goat In The Tree travels in pursuit of both an audience for his stories and his next meal. Fictional travelogue, love story, and the misadventures of a teller of tales, Lorne Elliott sends his narrator tip-toeing around the uncomfortable edge of things, out to where stories bloom, and brings them back for us to enjoy.
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Against the Machine
Manifesto
by Brian Van Norman
Part of the Essential Prose series
Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children's generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani's university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A "manifesto" to be remembered.
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Somewhere in the Stars
by Frank Polizzi
Part of the Essential Prose series
Taking place during World War II, Somewhere in the Stars is the story of three young men from San Francisco -- Nick Spataro, his cousin Paolo, and friend Nathan Fein -- and their adventures as members of an American tank battalion chasing the Germans up the Italian peninsula, while Nick's Sicilian dad is interned as an "enemy alien" back in the USA. Despite encountering prejudice both at home and during their tank training, the three show uncanny skill in outmaneuvering and destroying German tanks, until their own tank is blown up. Tragic events both on and off the battlefield, bravery, guilt in the loss of friends, romance, trauma, feelings of regret, daring rescues and eventual re-union with loved ones make for a powerful and explosive mix.
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A Feast of Brief Hopes
by Bruce Meyer
Part of the Essential Prose series
There are unseen forces in our lives that shape who we are and what we become. How we respond to those forces determines our futures. These stories examine how characters respond to the unexpected. Do we carry our memories of the beautiful moments of life with us into death? And, ultimately, what do we value in life that defines us--from a hat to the shadow of a figure in a window reminding us of what we have lost or need to hold onto?
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That Summer in Provincetown
by Caroline Vu
Part of the Essential Prose series
This story follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they struggle through major events of the 20th century. From the War of Independence against the French colonial power to the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a family's resilience in the face of tragedy, as told through the voice of a young girl attempting to understand family scandals within an historical context. At the novel's core is the death from AIDS in the early 1980s of the narrator's half French, half Vietnamese cousin Daniel, a beautiful rebel who is stricken down following a summer escapade in Provincetown. His family of three generations of physicians cannot bear to call the disease by its true name. Daniel dies alone in his Montreal hospital room.
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The Shining Fragments
by Robin Blackburn McBride
Part of the Essential Prose series
A heartbreaking arrival in a new country. Thrust too early into adulthood. Will he survive Canada's turbulent streets?
Toronto, 1882. Joseph Conlon has never felt more alone. Parentless after his mother dies on the voyage from Ireland, the frightened eight-year-old witnesses his sister's abduction and is abandoned at the train station. But once he's placed in a Catholic orphanage, Joseph discovers a gift for drawing and friends that begin to fill the hole in his heart.
Falling for a mercurial girl acrobat, his desire to win her affection drives him to find her after she runs off for a life on the stage. And as he leaves the institution and grows to manhood, the young immigrant endures dangerous work, anti-Irish bigotry, and lying about his faith to survive… only to have his longing for family lead to tragedy.
Will Joseph ever reach the place where he belongs?
In this poignant and lyrical story, author Robin Blackburn McBride follows one boy's emotional and colorful journey. Deftly depicting a compelling era while exploring the intensely personal challenges of the human experience, McBride's inspirational tale of hope and courage will touch you deeply.
The Shining Fragments is a meticulously researched and rendered historical family saga. If you like complex characters, richly authentic settings, and stories of resilience, then you'll love Robin Blackburn McBride's immersive novel.
Buy The Shining Fragments to witness the strength of the human spirit today!
"Tales about orphans left to find their way in the New World are many, but few are as engaging as this story." -Historical Novel Society North America, Editors' Choice
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Easily Fooled
by H. Nigel Thomas
Part of the Essential Prose series
Less than an hour after Millington receives his permanent resident visa, he wonders if his husband Jay would now end their marriage. And Jay has multiple reasons to. Millington is an ex-Methodist minister, who once believed he could be celibate. When he fled Caribbean Methodism and came to Montreal, he thought he'd resolved the issues that made him leave, but he comes to understand that psychological trauma, childhood conditioning, parental and community expectations and his own need for community and family valorization are not easily exorcised. The third installment in the No Safeguards quartet of novels.