Five siblings, all haunted by the death of a brother in their youth. Twenty-four hours of the day when another of them will die. Guddy is struggling to get to her sister before she dies. Jerry worries about his son, who may have embroiled himself in some dangerous real estate dealings in Vancouver. Annie looks after the family's matriarch. Bjarne is living in the north after six years on Skid Row in Vancouver, unable to separate the realities of childhood and the present. Jean, their father, finds himself on a bench near Third Beach on the seawall, barefoot, carrying only a paper bag. And then there's Therese, trying to forgive them all before her body finally betrays her.

Autobiography of Childhood takes place over one day, moving through one sibling at a time. As each character is forced to react (or not react) to the news (or lack of news) of Therese's terminal illness, their actions create a nuanced portrait of the individual characters and the pressures of their present lives.

Sina Queyras's last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she currently resides.

John arrives in a Montreal airport with a suitcase in hand. We do not know where he is from, or who he is. He takes up work as a night-shift nurse and writes his reflections and impressions in a notebook that he carries with him at all times. By means of these personal entries, the novel allows us to explore his identity by following his daily movements and intimate thoughts, as well as his connections to those who come into contact with him. Based in a Montreal neighborhood called Carré St Louis, the story unfolds through nonlinear narrative connections that flow across city blocks, continents and oceans, and meander in and out of the characters' minds, dealing with questions of displacement, identity, and meaning.

Loren Edizel was born in Izmir, Turkey, and has lived in Canada most of her life. One of her novels, Izmir Hayaletleri (The Ghosts of Smyrna), was published in Turkey in 2008. "The Imam's Daughter" was published in Montreal Serai. She has recently completed a collection of short stories under the working title "The Confession." She currently lives in Toronto.

Janey knows she should be trying to put her academic career on the map, but how? She'll more readily poke fun at than engage in yet another overly dry and theoretical conference. And her husband and their friends simply encourage her off the serious academic path, providing anarchic ideas from Foucault-in-snowsuits to erotic poetry addressed to the harmonium collecting dust in the music department. A Large Harmonium is a sharply comical year-in-the-gloriously-unruly-life story. We follow Janey as she negotiates motherhood ("Little Max is a Roald Dahl story, I decide"); career ("the whole enterprise starts to resemble a lion-taming act without the lions"); frightful in-laws ("At breakfast, the two of them are serene and fit-looking. I never can see how people look like that in the morning"); and which literary hero her husband Hector most resembles ("Rochester! Why should I be Rochester? He's a bastard. And he has to be blinded and lose an arm or something before he can be tamed.") Along the way, she relies on Hector, boy-wonder babysitter Rene, and even crazy unreliable friend Jam. And on Jake, the understanding minister who helps her pick her way through it all.

Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Sue Sorensen now lives in Winnipeg, where she is a professor of English literature at Canadian Mennonite University. has published fiction and poetry and numerous scholarly articles. She has also edited a collection of essays on western Canadian literature, titled West of Eden. A Large Harmonium is her first novel.

A tattooed young man regains consciousness in the Don Jail, charged with his friend's murder. An anti-social office clerk falls for a handsome bike courier and abandons his former life. An Ojibwe teen hunts for her kidnapped girlfriend in an illegal sex trade ring and seeks revenge. This is the intense reality of The Dirt Chronicles, Kristyn Dunnion's stunning debut story collection. In these linked tales, urban outlaws in Toronto map out their plans to take over the world while living collectively in an abandoned chair factory, destined for demolition according to a real estate gentrification plan. Their community is infiltrated by the King, a dirty cop bent on obliterating the city's defiant underclass and exterminating the group's rogue members; in order to survive, they may have to betray what they value most: autonomy, friendship, and newly discovered concepts of freedom. Audacious and loud, The Dirt Chronicles is a thrashing three-chord rejection of mainstream culture and the powers-that-be, and a combustible homage to class rebellion.

Kristyn Dunnion is the author of several novels. She studied English Literature and Theatre at McGill University and earned a Masters Degree in English at the University of Guelph. She performs creeptastic art as Miss Kitty Galore, and is also the bass player for dykemetal heartthrobs, Heavy Filth. She lives in Toronto.