The stories in Sandy Bonny's collection The Sometimes Lake will transport readers from the Arctic Circle to Alberta's badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the deep lasting space of the prairies. The characters that readers meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents' realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road's end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; others who are confused by cultural shift or troubled by the security of cults; women who try to grieve for their unborn children, and others who play at suicide.

At the vortex of the surprising plots churns Bonny's keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion. Her curiosity and scrutinizing intelligence as well as her ever playful wit guide the reader through close encounters with physical and psychological landscapes and then reveal the uncommon denominators in them that make people unique.

Born of an adulterous affair in London, England, Marcel is ethnically ambiguous, growing up in the racially charged 1960s with a white surrogate father named Oliver. Abandoned as an infant, Marcel is haunted by vague memories of his bohemian mother, and is desperate to know who his real parents are. When Oliver is promoted to foreign correspondent, he leaves Marcel in the care of his ill-equipped friends, including the beautiful Pippa. The world is being swept by a wave of liberation—coups, revolutions and the end of colonialism. While Oliver rushes toward the action, Marcel is set adrift in swinging London, a city of magic—and a city where he can never quite fit in. Just when it seems they will never be reunited, Marcel is sent to join Oliver in Vietnam. But by the summer of 1963, the war is escalating, and Oliver is finally overwhelmed by his doomed love for Pippa. When Marcel eventually uncovers the shattering truth about his mother, his entire world is rearranged. Now, as his fiftieth birthday approaches, Marcel is asked to take care of his friend's eleven-year-old daughter, Iris. Prodded by her sharp-eyed company, he reflects on his own bittersweet childhood and the experiences that have shaped his present.

Stray Love is beautifully illustrated with original drawings by noted Toronto artist/filmmaker Heather Frise. NOTE: This book is also sold elsewhere under the title A Thousand Tiny Truths.

In the stories of Mad Hope, Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. We think we know these people but discover that we don't—they are more alive, more real and more complex than we first imagined. A high school science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceausescu's Romania after a student makes a shocking request. The uncertainty, anxiety and anticipation of pregnancy are examined through an online chat group. Parenting is viewed from the perspective of a gay man caring for his friend and her adopted son. A tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents.

In Mad Hope, Birrell uses precise, inventive language to capture the beautiful mess of being human—and more than lives up to her Journey Prize accolades. Birrell's characters come to greet us, undo us, make us yearn and make us smile.

George Mallory was one of the last great heroic adventurers of the twentieth century, a man of uncommon athleticism and ambition. In Tanis Rideout's beautifully written and elegantly conceived novel, Mallory is revealed as never before in this fictional reimagining of his legendary final summit attempt.

Through Mallory's perspective, and that of the newest member of the expedition, Sandy Irvine, we get a vivid picture of expedition life and the ever-present dangers they faced, from falls, avalanches, altitude sickness, and from their own human frailties as well. As we follow the men upwards, we also journey with them into their pasts. Alternating with the expedition's story is a day in the life of Mallory's wife, Ruth. While a war-scarred England waits for Mallory to reclaim some of the Empire's lost glory, Ruth begins to bristle at the burden of having to be the dutifully loyal wife to a national hero. It is through her eyes that we glimpse a different side of George, and what emerges is a portrait of complex marriage defined as much by absence as by great love.

Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching. In the title story, a young woman from New Brunswick uses figure skating as a way to fill the void left by her deceased father, and ends up as a Russian circus performer who dances on ice with two skating bears. We also meet an unlikely swim team member, a crude and ineffective search and rescue volunteer, and Sparky, an ancient boxing trainer, who recalls the tumultuous life of his childhood friend, a dwarf named Maurice.

When Our Woman catches her son in the hay with another man and is soon after accosted by Red-the-Twit about her own husband's supposed infidelity (and strange sexual predilections), she embarks on an odyssey through grief and madness toward the realization of something all-too-human. Brilliantly drawn with the cadences of rural Ireland, Malarky is a wickedly funny and original tour-de-force.

This is the story of Anakana Schofield's teapot-wielding 'Our Woman': fretful mother, disgruntled farmwife, and—surprisingly late in life—sexual outlaw/anthropologist. Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity —Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist.

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She contributes to the London Review of Books, the Globe &apm; Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky is her first novel.

Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl's self-consciousness. Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida—a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, she suffers through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up and meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah and she is shocked to discover that he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman who has control over him.

As Myra and her family return to an unnamed, middle-class, grey Canadian city, her mother suddenly leaves the nest. When Gayl and Elijah travel north and infiltrate Myra's life, Myra walks willingly into their world. Myra continues to experiment sexually with Elijah, while Gayl plays an integral part in the increasingly abject games. Slowly, Myra finds herself drawn to Gayl over Elijah, while she struggles with conflicting loyalty to her new friends.

Maidenhead is the story of a young woman's exploration of danger. How does a girl feel scared? What is she scared of? And how does telling yourself not to be scared really work? As Myra enters worlds unfamiliar of sex, porn and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.

When botanical artist Clare Livingstone unexpectedly inherits her uncle's property in Tuscany, she travels to Italy to learn why—despite their estranged relationship and complicated past—she was chosen tomaintain his legacy. The hill town of Cortona, however, won't give up its secrets easily. Clare is immediately plunged into intrigue. Two men pursue her, but with agendas of their own; neighbours try to delve into the story of her past; and unscrupulous archaeologists are drawn to her property in search of buried Etruscan artefacts. Once again forced to negotiate between desire and history—in a balance as fragile as the orchids she illustrates for science—Clare realizes she cannot escape her life of deception until she finally confronts the truth she has kept buried so long.