In Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and terrain of America’s least-populous state. Beyond the tourist destinations of Jackson Hole and Yellowstone lies a less familiar and wilder frontier defined by the tension wrought by abundance and scarcity. A young runaway with a big secret slips across the state border and steals a collie pup from the Meeker County fairgrounds. A chorus of trainmen details a day spent laying rail across the Wyoming Territory, while contemporary voices describe life in the oil and gas fields near Gillette. A traveling preacher is caught up in a deadly skirmish between cattle rustlers and ranchers on his way from Rawlins to the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River. Locals and activists clash when a tourist makes an archaeological discovery near Hoodoo Mountain. With spirited, lyrical prose, Hagy expertly weaves together Wyoming’s colorful pioneer and speculator history with the not-often-heard voices of petroleum workers, thrill-seeking rock climbers, and those left behind by the latest boom and bust.

The story of an immigrant family trying to build a life in an unforgiving new world, Under This Unbroken Sky is a mesmerizing and absorbing first novel of love and greed, pride and desperation. Award-winning writer Shandi Mitchell based this evocative and compelling narrative of struggle and survival on the Canadian prairie on her own family history.

Winner of the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Far from the landscapes of her earlier life, Jana raised her daughter, Willow, on the beautiful scrapbooks she kept of her own childhood in Prague before World War II. But her stories end with the beginning of the Holocaust, and Willow knows little of her mother’s life during the war and its aftermath. Jana’s memories of this time are so guarded that Willow is uncertain who her father is – the answer left behind in Montréal, the city where Jana first settled after the war.

When both Willow and Jana find themselves back in Montréal, the past can no longer be hidden. New loves are found and lost loves rekindled, and mother and daughter decide to journey to Prague to unearth the stories that can no longer stay buried.

A rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best-loved writers, her first book in nine years and a nominee for the 2009 National Book Award. Lark and Termite is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.

At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother, Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War.

In this debut collection, set in Winnipeg, Leslie Vryenhoek draws us into the desires of those who are easily overlooked: the chary cook at a home for pregnant women who grieves the transition from nuns to social workers; a down-on-his-luck labourer in Winnipeg’s inner city who wants to ride a stolen bicycle; the middle-aged woman, demoralized by family obligations, who lets a fast-talking chocolate salesman in the door.

These are stories about the longing that gnaws at our most ordinary days, and about those rare moments of acute certainty, even joy, on which whole lives can pivot and change course.

This is the third book in Towler's "Snow Island" trilogy, set off the New England coast. Ruth Lambert left Snow Island when she was a teenager, but returns in the Fall of 1990 after her aunt's death, when she and her sister inherit the old Snow Inn. Nick McGarrell, a Vietnam veteran, has quit his job on the mainland as an engineer and retreated to his island birthplace to work as a carpenter. Nora Venable, an aging lesbian and owner of the island's abandoned mansion, moves into the caretaker's cottage on a whim. From the confines of their small New England community, the trio watch as the United States prepares to go to war once again, this time in the Persian Gulf. When the mansion burns down one night in a mysterious fire, the lives of Nora, Nick, and Ruth unexpectedly intersect, tearing them from their private—but determined–battles with the past, and propelling them into the unknown future of loss, love, and redemption.