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Musgrave writes of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through her real-life adventures with her outlaw husband, Stephen Reid, and her teenage girls, taking us from the Queen Cha

The characters from Susan Musgrave’s A Cargo of Orchids are back in this brilliantly engaging novel.

Evocative and superbly rakish, these essays are a generous diagnosis of the often offbeat worlds of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through the real life adventures of Susan M

Girls in their teens form friendships that are astonishingly intense, yet these relationships are often broken and reformed, filled with confidences and betrayals, loyalty and fickleness.

Werewolves don’t have a how-to manual—nor do men embarking on a new life together.

Skinny, quiet hipster Dylan Warner was the kind of guy other men barely glanced at until an evening’s indiscretion with a handsome stranger turned him into a werewolf.

In the mid-1950s, Jack Dayton flees his working-class prospects in Omaha and heads to Hollywood, convinced he’ll be the next James Dean.

Aside from a sympathetic parole officer, Aiden Finn is alone in the world. He knows this is his last chance—after a lifetime in and out of prison, one more mistake will land him there to stay.

Brute leads a lonely life in a world where magic is commonplace. He is seven and a half feet of ugly, and of disreputable descent. No one, including Brute, expects him to be more than a laborer.

Fiscal analyst Mike Carlson is good with spreadsheets and baseball stats. He doesn’t believe in fate, true love or fantasy. But then a fertility goddess whisks him away to another world.

Jeff Dawkins’s last partner left him with a mortgage he can’t afford and nonrefundable tickets for a month’s vacation in Europe.

Travis Miller has a machining job, a cat named Elwood and a pathetic love life. The one bright spot in his existence is the handsome guitar player he sometimes passes on his way home from work.

This winter, Jude Bloch can't decide what bothers him more—the crowds of people or the holiday revelry.

When Nicky Hauser walks in on his restaurant-owner boyfriend having sex with a waiter, Nicky loses his lover, his job and his home all in one night.

Mike Filey's column "The Way We Were" first appeared in the Toronto Sunday Sun not long after the first edition of the paper hit the newsstands on September 16, 1973.