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2013 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award — Winner 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize — Shortlisted 2012 BMO Winterset Award — Finalist From critically acclaimed and award-winning writer, Russell Wangersky, comes a new collection of short fiction. Everyone has something they’re good at: one particular personal skill that they use to keep their lives moving forward when their worlds suddenly become difficult or near-impossible. For some, it’s denial; for others, blunt pragmatism. Still others depend on an over-inflated view of self to keep criticism and doubt at bay.

The Master of Happy Endings is a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his late seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself. Axel Thorstad lives in a shack on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. Once a popular school teacher and thespian who touched the lives of hundreds of his students, he now lives in retirement and mourns the recent death of his wife. But even this stoical giant of a 77-year-old finds the isolation too much.

Acclaimed Canadian poet Steven Price has conjured a stunning debut novel that explores what we ask from each other, and how much we are prepared to give. Set in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Into That Darkness opens at the moment when a massive earthquake hits the entire west coast with devastating results. Amid the destruction of the city, survivors are left to negotiate a calamity in which bonds of civility are pushed to their limits and often broken.

When his best friend is murdered in a fit of jealous rage, Izzy Schneider is compelled to reconstruct the relationship and exhume a hidden past that tests the authority of truth and weighs the burden of history. In A Good Man, critically acclaimed novelist Cynthia Holz examines Izzy’s complex lifelong friendship with Phil Lewis. Izzy escapes from Nazi Germany as a young man, leaving behind his family, who later perish in the Holocaust; Phil, a war hero, stays and fights with the partisans and saves hundreds of lives.

Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award 2015 — Nominated Faith healers, movie moguls, and social-climbing fraudsters collide in Depression-era Los Angeles It’s the Great Depression and Mary Mabel McTavish is suicidal. A drudge at the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies (aka Wealthy Juvenile Delinquents), she is at London General Hospital when little Timmy Beeford is carried into emergency and pronounced dead. He was electrocuted at an evangelical road show when the metal cross on top of the revival tent was struck by lightning. Believing she’s guided by her late mother, Mary Mabel lays on hands.

2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Awards — Winner, Fiction Judith finds the courage to stand up for her beliefs and protest anti-Semitic hypocrisy. Judith is a young woman who lived in Israel for a decade, was a peace activist there, and defines herself as "left-wing," yet in graduate school back in Canada, she discovers that vilification of Israel is the expected norm.

Dying is the best way to revive your musical career … even if you’re not really dead. It’s all slipping away from Roc Molotov – his band, his girlfriend, and worst of all, his ability to play the game demanded by the star-making machinery of the music business. When the best record he’s ever made is about to pass unnoticed, his oldest friend and manager, Uncle Strange, concocts the perfect scheme.

An unexpected conflict forces Verna to re-examine her life. What was it Donald used to say? "When it comes to children, you pay now or pay later. You never don’t pay."Middle-aged Verna Macoun Woodcock returns to the family cottage for the first time in 38 years to scatter the ashes of her husband, father, and twin sister. At first she is alone except for her dad’s dog, the lake, bitter memories, and a barely hidden drinking problem.

Short Candles is a novel about possibility, choice and acceptance and is remarkable for its insights into human nature. Opening in the 1960s, it spans some forty years in the life of Suzanne Cardinal, who has the giftor bears the burdenof foresight. While she becomes a visionary to some people in her home town, to her family she is the difficult child who was unable to warn them of an impending death. But Suzanne has little control over the manifestation of her gift. She speaks only when she has a vision and ends by hurting both those she warns and those she does not warn.

Vikkan Lantry, a pianist with more talent than ambition, is content with his job at an upscale cocktail lounge until a request from reclusive soprano, Ulrike Vogel, draws him grudgingly back into the world of classical music. Ulrike’s mysterious past, and her friendship with elderly Viennese piano teacher, Dieter Mann, usher Vikkan into an intrigue that begins in the nineteenth century with an unknown song cycle composed by Robert Schumann, and ends in the present-day with a grisly double murder.