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Dreams vanish in most of the masterful stories that make up Norma Harrs’s new collection.

These twelve linked stories confirm what we’ve suspsected all along: eventually we all outsmart our parents. In this brilliant debut collection by Debbie Howlett we return to the turbulent 70s revisiting the bittersweet wonder years of Diane Wilkinson, a precocious teen living in suburban Montreal amidst the Catholic/Protestant, Federalist/Separatist split that foreshadowed the October Crisis.

An artist cooks a Jamaican meal for her straying lover, thinking she might just have the one ingredient that will ensure he never leaves her. A beautiful woman slips into the sea near her Jamaican home and disappears on the eve of a reunion with her Scottish fianc. A white law student and a black harlot do a sexual tango in a shanty with fatal results.

Sheila Peters makes her impressive fiction debut with a collection of loosely linked stories whose characters, whether they live in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Prairies, are ordinary men and women who have seemingly everyday experiences that glimmer with the extraordinary. Her spare, stripped-down prose, leavened with sly humour and a gift for poetic resonance, reminds one of the work of Alice Munro or Sandra Birdsell.Peters creates people who often feel out of sync with the spiritual, emotional, and physical environments they find themselves in.

In 1993, a group of five Kingston women–T. Anne Archer, Mary Cavanagh, Elizabeth Greene, Tara Kainer, Janice Kirk–began to compile an anthology about Canada at the point where one millennium becomes another. As the newly-formed Foxglove Collective, they solicited manuscripts that reflected origins (how the past shapes the present), life at the end of this century, and projections past the year 2000.

Cyril Dabydeen’s new collection of stories, North of the Equator, looks at the polarities of tropical and temperate places. Acclaimed novelist Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners) says, "Dabydeen is in the vanguard of contemporary short-story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada." Dabydeen’s characters occupy the spaces in between. They live in limbo, stretched between two worlds: one, an adopted home in Canada; the other, a birthplace in the islands scattered across the equator.

Whether we are eavesdropping on the imaginative Saturdays of a Portuguese cleaning lady or living through a divorced woman’s search for the elusive orgasm. Norma Harrs manages in this collection of short stories to absorb the essence of her narrator’s psyche with the clarity of a good actress who gets under the very skin of her characters. Love, either the absence of or yearning for, is the theme that links that stories in this collection together.

Children travel across generations and across time: yesterday to the present. Childhoods determine the fantasms of existence. Wounds slow to heal: abandonment, adoption, feelings of rejection and uselessness, of blame, of uncontrolled initiation to sexuality, extreme loneliness when one retreats from society, obsessive searching for the absolute, desire to rebuild the world again by giving birth, confrontation of death.All these themes appear in the violent yet tender stories in this collection, rather like tunnelling through to a rebirth.

Although Patricia M. Boyer won a scholarship to McMaster University with the highest mathematics marks in Ontario and graduated at age 19, literature and languages were her specialty. She first worked as a public librarian, next as a secondary school teacher, then as a newspaper editor. A community leader in arts and theatre, Patricia was devoted to human rights action in her local community and around the world, church work, drama, the education of children with disabilities, and music.

Small things can often mean a great deal. For the past five years readers of the Toronto Star’s website have been telling each other that, as they shared their stories in a feature called "Acts of Kindness." The common thread is that a stranger helped when it was needed most, without thought of a reward and often without leaving a name. Since its debut in December, 2004, "Acts of Kindness" has become a daily fixture at thestar.com. About four thousand stories have been submitted and two thousand have been published.