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When tragedy strikes, thirteen-year-old Maddy Barnes's life shatters. Torn from her family and village, she finds herself out on the mean streets of Toronto in the 1970s, a gritty twilight world of street kids, speed freaks, glam rockers, body rub parlours and a vicious biker named Hermann. But Toronto is also the centre of Canada's emerging gay revolution. As men and women start coming out of the shadows, Maddy confronts the shadows of her own past, and ultimately comes to understand that sometimes there's no explaining the unspeakable things we do for love.

On the night of her sixteenth birthday and before her father has the chance to force her to marry a complete stranger, Princess Margaret sneaks away from the riches and safety of the palace. Torn between her fate and freedom, Princess Margaret desperately goes looking for her mother as the answer. In a quest of soul searching and physical hardships, the twist of events may take the readers by surprise, instilling a piece of the story in their hearts.  

A seismic shift in Hollywood’s power structure occurred during the 1980s. Gone were the moguls and founding fathers of the motion picture industry — Jack L. Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, and Darryl Zanuck. The studios were being taken over by technological giants such as Sony and Panasonic, and the new owners turned to lawyers and talent agents to run their newly obtained properties. In 1982, an aspiring young screenwriter, Nick Caggiano, moves from the Bronx to Los Angeles, hoping to find work in the industry.

Three-and-a-half-year-old Michael Murphy is a pain in the ass. He sure shouldn’t be invited to any more weddings; last one he kicked the man his mother married in the shins. All he does is piss and moan, and he won't eat anything his mother cooks. For the life of him, he can’t understand why his new grandmother would try to smother him with a pillow. Through it all, Michael is a fighter — he survives malnutrition and double pneumonia before his first day at a one-room schoolhouse on the Pinch in late 1950s Newfoundland. Then there’s a baseball bat, a hammer, a hatchet, some inconvenien

Hilary has one goal for her first year in junior high: to become popular. But her plans are turned upside down when her best friend leaves for the summer and a quirky girl named Kallie moves in next door. Kallie paints constellations on her ceiling, sleeps in a hammock, and enacts fantastical plays in front of cute boys on the beach. Yet despite Kallie’s lack of interest in being “cool,” Hilary and Kallie find themselves becoming friends. That summer friendship, however, is put to the test when school begins, reigniting Hilary's obsession with climbing the social ladder.

Briony, a prairie girl with a disfigured face, is adopted when she is nine by a childless older couple, Dagget and Moll, who appear mysteriously one day at her orphanage. They take her to their remote town of Crowsbeak in northern Saskatchewan where Briony, tormented by her schoolmates for her scarred face and dark skin, struggles to fit in. Briony soon learns that Dagget is in fact a renowned bush pilot and, partly as a means of escape, she begins flying with him.

Cassie, self-educated and brown skinned, works in a laundry in rural Mississippi. Judith, illiterate and white, dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half sisters, and together they set out in an old junker on a risky road trip through the 1950s Jim Crow South.

In the summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira enters the high-stakes world of New York City ballet, a fiercely competitive world of struggle, obsession, passion for beauty--and something sinister that will challenge her, protect her, and ultimately take her innocence.

June Elbus' uncle is her best friend, the only person who understands her. When he dies, far too young, fourteen-year-old June's world is turned upside down. But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life--someone who will help her heal.

Marina Makarova is a woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life. Swept up on the tides of the Russian Revolution, Marina joins the marches for workers' rights, falls in love with a radical young poet, and betrays everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through tremendous upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion, devastating loss, and the private heroism of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary times.