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2012 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — Winner 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award — Finalist, English-Language Fiction In December of 1944, the Red Army entered Budapest to begin one of the bloodiest sieges of the Second World War. By February, the siege was over, but its effects were to be felt for decades afterward. Siege 13 is a collection of thirteen linked stories about this terrible time in history, both its historical moment, but also later, as a legacy of silence, haunting, and trauma that shadows the survivors.

These nine razor-sharp stories herald the return of one of Canada’s most accomplished writers to the short story form. Stylistically varied and linguistically confident, here are compulsively readable stories that plumb the complexities of the human heart. A dying Finn, a philandering photographer recovering from an emergency splenectomy, a young woman heavy with an hysterical pregnancy - these are just some of the surprising characters that people these pages.

Mark Anthony Jarman is one of Canada’s most original and compelling writers of short fiction. My White Planet is his latest collection of fourteen new stories, many of which have previously won or been short-listed for literary magazine awards. Jarman’s use of language and metaphor is unique in the Canadian literary pantheon. With extraordinary linguistic energy, he pushes the boundaries of fiction and story-telling. Every sentence reverberates with subtle meaning and every reading of a Jarman story brings out ever deeper layers of complexity and nuance.

Just as blue eyes or a birthmark may be passed down through the generations, so too are other, far less welcome traits, not all of them physical, but emotional. More in Anger is the poignant story of three generations of women and the emotional legacy that follows each of them throughout the years. In 1915, Opal King marries a man whose past steeped him in anger. Opal’s thwarted dreams, and her husband’s temper, reverberate and influence the life of their elder daughter Pearl.

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.

In the grand literary tradition of Gore Vidal’s novels about American political history, Roy MacSkimming has conjured an extraordinary novelistic recreation of the last days of Canada’s indomitable first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Narrated by his private secretary, Joseph Pope, Macdonald opens with stirring scenes of Sir John fighting his last great election battle on issues that uncannily echo our national concerns today. The year is 1891, and there is a very real fear of absorption by the United States.

Judith and Antoine were lovers for a brief time. Then, suddenly, brutally, it ended. Nine years later, they meet again and attempt to revive their old passion. They dream of rewriting their history and burning the memories that are still troubling their souls. But each remains obsessed with the other’s past and the beautiful dream transforms itself little by little into a prison, a shared bout of craziness into which even the reader finds himself irresistibly drawn. Eventually, the couple’s shared madness and jealousy turns homicidal.

From the author of Macdonald, comes a new novel about an extraordinary love triangle set at the apex of Canada’s national life at the dawn of the twentieth century. A deeply absorbing novel of passion and politics, Laurier in Love reveals a side of Sir Wilfrid Laurier as Canadians have never known him: romantic and idealistic, inspiring and seductive, yet conflicted and compromised, as he balances his time between his wife and his mistress. Elegant, silver-tongued Sir Wilfrid Laurier is just beginning his fabled career as one of the nation’s greatest leaders.

Ladykiller is the astonishing debut collection of seven smart stories from an exciting new voice in Canadian literature. Charlotte Gill is a brilliant young writer who is not afraid to stare down the truth and shame the devil. She conjures compelling stories about escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. A couple plots against a crying baby in the apartment below as their dysfunctional relationship begins to veer off course. A hot-shot scuba-diving instructor falls for a teenaged girl in a perilous Lolita-like romance.

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.