Showing titles in Genre Fiction

Set in Calgary in 1982, during the recession that arrived on the heels of Canada’s National Energy Program, The Western Alienation Merit Badge follows the Murray family as they struggle with grief and find themselves on the brink of financial ruin. After the death of her stepmother, Frances "Frankie" Murray returns to Calgary to help her father, Jimmy, and her sister, Bernadette, pay the mortgage on the family home. When Robyn, a long-lost friend, becomes their house guest, old tensions are reignited.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE. A sweet and subversive coming-of-age novel by award-winning memoirist and screenwriter Ariel Schrag. When Adam Freedman—a skinny, awkward, inexperienced teenager from Piedmont, California—goes to stay with his older sister Casey in New York City, he is hopeful...

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans 25 years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality.

Back Lands magazine for outdoor enthusiasts has featured Robin Hawke and her outfitting business several times. When her friend, Josie Whittle, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, asks Robin to take a group of writers and photographers out for a week Robin is happy to do it until she finds out that one of the writers going on the trip has never even been camping, let alone gone on a multi-day hike. The only hiking Marianne Jones does is at the mall, so she is not happy about this trip. Marianne makes Robin mad before the hike even starts.

Not every story has a happy ending. Since her brother's death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful.

Drugs, smuggling, big money and political intrigue in Iceland rally with love, passion, murder and betrayal until the winner takes all...in the masterful, explosive conclusion to the award-winning Reykjavík Noir trilogy. The prison doors slam shut behind Agla when her sentence ends, but her lover Sonja is not there to meet her. As a group of foreign businessmen tries to draw Agla into an ingenious fraud that stretches from Iceland around the world, Agla and her former nemesis María find the stakes being raised at a terrifying speed.

Ellen, the narrator of Boyd's previous novel, The Revolution of Little Girls, this time pierces the heart of the sexual revolution in her quest to find a woman hero or - by default - to become one. Ferociously paced, Terminal Velocity delineates six wonderfully engaging characters: Artemis Foote, for whom being rich, talented, and beautiful is a kind of game; Jordan, a messianic fugitive who becomes Ellen's lover; Amethyst Woman, a Marxist/Leninist dentist; Ross, a red-diaper baby and now a columnist for Ramparts; and Pearl, an art history professor turned hippie.

Miles Jupp stars as fussy food writer Damien Trench in the complete four series of this much-loved BBC Radio 4 sitcom. Well-known cookery writer Damien Trench is famous for his book A Year in the Kitchen, a diary of everything he cooked and ate over the course of 12 months. Now, for the follow-up volume, In and Out of the Kitchen, Damien undertakes to open up the doors 'not only to my kitchen, but also to my life'. But is Damien’s life as idyllic as his listeners might suppose?

Who do you trust when you have no one left but yourself? Kenzie is a military-trained assassin, hunting her target in Mexico. Cori is a student at the University of Guadalajara. One fateful afternoon their lives will come together under a flurry of gunfire. Questioning the lies around them, they will soon learn that they can not live without each other. On the run from an unknown enemy, they must learn to trust each other, and to believe they'll make it out alive.

Beatrice and Henry - the parents of the protagonist of Dale Peck’s debut novel, Martin and John—are first drawn together when the teenage Henry is battling a brain tumor he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they’re still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again.

Do you know who you are? Are you comfortable in your skin? Outed by her best friend in front of the whole neighborhood, Niya is trying to come to terms with being a lesbian. When she falls for her straight neighbor, Jamilla, there is no more denying who she really is. Niya will do whatever it takes to prove her love, even if it means taking a life. What will happen when family issues, fame, the struggle for love, and reality set in? How will Niya deal with a hip-hop career as she tries to repair her broken heart and family issues?

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street - a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice.

The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

Satellite Street is woven through with the theme of transitions. Paul Marden is grappling with the way that a sudden, devastating illness and his slow recovery have made him reevaluate what "normal" is for a man in his 60s who grew up in a time of change that promised better days than the ones he is now living through. Another character's transition involves both gender and spirit; Lelee was born male and wanted to transition to female, but the process has been hindered by heart issues. Lelee also believes that she can speak to the dead, although she is skeptical.

Going to Cabin Green alone after the death of his fiancee was Ben's first mistake. His second mistake was tempting fate by saying, "There's no such thing as an evil building." Now he's caught in a nightmare of his own making deep in the woods of Northern Michigan. Even worse, a family history of mental illness makes it impossible for him to know if the ghosts haunting the cabin are real or all in his head.

In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy. Now navigating a blighted landscape, Flora, her friends, and a sullen young slave she adopts as her own child leave their oppressive pasts behind to find their place in the world.

South Africa, 1901, the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her son are taken from their farm by force to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp where, the English promise, they will be safe. Johannesburg, 2010. Sixteen-year-old outsider Willem just wants to be left alone with his books and his dog. Worried he’s not turning out right, his ma and her boyfriend send him to New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Here they ‘make men out of boys’. Guaranteed.

After a ferocious early-springtime storm, young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand is shipwrecked in the English Channel near the coastal Kent town of Dengate - he is one of few survivors. Soon after, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. A loner by nature, he’s a curiosity to the nosy townspeople, the gregarious editor of the paper, and his melodramatic landlady, whose own private life is fraught by the unexplained absence of her son and suspicious disappearance of her husband.

Happily settled in Florida, Sonja believes she’s escaped the trap set by unscrupulous drug lords. But when her son, Tomas, is taken, she’s back to square one...and Iceland. Her lover, Agla, is awaiting sentencing for financial misconduct after the banking crash, and Sonja refuses to see her. And that’s not all...Agla owes money to some extremely powerful men, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it back. With her former nemesis, customs officer Bragi, on her side, Sonja puts her own plan into motion to bring down the drug barons and her scheming ex-husband and get Tomas back.