Showing results for "Press on" in Literary Fiction

Jeremy has bought into the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line, and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he’s risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack. Waitress Charlene is desperately unhappy and looking for a way out of her marriage to her high-school sweetheart. A drunken encounter sends Charlene and her boss careening. The Ice Shack stops being an oasis of sanity and, as Jeremy struggles to keep his business afloat, he’ll stop at nothing to maintain his successful, good guy self-image.

A dark and comic novel, Congratulations on Everything tracks the struggles, frailties, and cruelly pyrrhic victories of the middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant and a 30ish lunch-shift waitress. Jeremy has bought in to the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line, and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he's risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack.

Harriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson, and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.

1914. A boy enrols in the army, hoping to find peace in the great adventure of war. Handed a rifle, he discovers the grim reality: grey days distinguished only by the ever-present spectre of death. In the midst of horror, he finds close friendships, love and companionship. In an unexpected act of courage, he changes the course of history, bringing German and Brits to put down their weapons for a celebration of peace.

Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer. The catch? Gladys is a ghost.

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank’s life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once her blinders are lifted, and she sees the country lifestyle she’s always known in a whole new way, with hidden pain and anguish lurking behind familiar faces and violence forever threatening to burst forth, like brushfire smouldering and dormant under the muskeg.