The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

This short, infectious, and bittersweet coming-of-age story in the vein of Stranger Things and Stand by Me about a group of misfit kids who spend an unforgettable summer investigating local ghost stories and urban legends was a finalist for the 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

When neurosurgeon Jake Baker operates, he knows he's handling more than a patient's delicate brain tissue--he's altering the seat of consciousness, the golden vault of memory. And memory, Jake knows well, can be a tricky, quicksilver thing. Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls, a.k.a. Cataract City---a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place---one of Jake's closest confidants was his uncle Calvin, a sweet but eccentric misfit enamored of occult artefacts and outlandish conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turned twelve, Calvin invited him to join the "Saturday Night Ghost Club"--a seemingly light-hearted project to investigate some of Cataract City's more macabre urban myths. Over the course of that life-altering summer, Jake not only met his lifelong best friend and began to imagine his own future, he came to realize that his uncle's preoccupation with chilling legends sprang from something so painful, and buried so deep, that Calvin himself was unaware of the source.

All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay

Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all.

In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candour, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics--entrenched favouritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents."

That Time I Loved You: Linked Storied

​Tensions that have lurked beneath the surface of a shiny new subdivision rise up, in new fiction from the author of the Toronto Book Award—shortlisted The Wondrous Woo.

​The suburbs of the 1970s promised to be heaven on earth—new houses, new status, happiness guaranteed. But in a Scarborough subdivision populated by newcomers from all over the world, a series of sudden catastrophic events reveals that not everyone’s dreams come true. Moving from house to house, Carrianne Leung explores the inner lives behind the tidy front gardens and picture-perfect windows, always returning to June, an irrepressible adolescent Chinese-Canadian coming of age in this shifting world. Through June and her neighbours, Leung depicts the fine line where childhood meets the realities of adult life, and examines, with insight and sharp prose, how difficult it is to be true to ourselves at any age.

Hum If You Don't Know The Words by Bianca Marais

Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a heart-wrenching debut novel set in Johannesburg in the 1970s, a time of great upheaval and violence. It features a young white girl, Robin, whose parents have been killed, and a visiting Xhosa woman, Beauty, searching for her own daughter, who has disappeared in the Soweto uprisings. When Beauty is hired as a caretaker for Robin, they build a tentative bond despite the restrictions of apartheid.

Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the two narratives interweave to create a rich and complex tapestry of emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid South Africa. This book is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.  

A Good Wife by Samra Zafar

In A Good Wife Author Samra Zafar tells her own harrowing and inspiring story, from a young girl with big dreams, through finding strength in the face of oppression and then finally battling through to empowerment. She faced years of abuse after arriving in Canada as a teenage bride in a hastily arranged marriage, but nothing could stop her from pursuing her dreams

At 15, Samra Zafar had big dreams for herself. She was going to go to university, and forge her own path. Then with almost no warning, those dreams were pulled away from her when she was suddenly married to a stranger at 17 and had to leave behind her family in Pakistan to move to Canada. Her new husband and his family promised the fulfillment of her dream, not a betrayal of it. But as the walls of their home slowly became a prison, Samra realized the promises were empty ones.