Item category 1: General Fiction

Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit i...

An acute psychological portrait of a marriage where lofty traditions clash with appetite and ambition For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the she falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renou...

Fleeing Melbourne for a village in the Yorkshire Dales had felt right. Sanctuary, I'd thought. But nowhere is as straightforward as it first appears. When Giselle flees to the north Yorkshire village of Hollydale, she doesn't give much thought to what she might find there. She's more concerned wi...

A food story to binge. A ghost story to devour. A love story to savour. When dead-end dishwasher Kostya discovers the ability to summon spirits through the food he cooks, he embarks on a journey to open a New York City restaurant that serves closure - something he's craved for as long as he can r...

A contemplative story about one man trying to move forward from the trauma of his youth to become a better father to his son.Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it's an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfw...

A special 25th anniversary edition of Paulo Coehlo's extraordinary international bestselling phenomenon--the inspiring spiritual tale of self-discovery that has touched millions of lives around the world.Combing magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selli...

"Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor." Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created ...

Leonard is alone and rootless, returning to London after his father's death. He moves in with his distant brother William and his family, hoping to renew their friendship but learning to drop his expectations of brotherhood. William is a former lecturer and activist who now runs informal meetings...

In nine stories spanning from the end of the twentieth century to the end of the world as we know it, he explores our youthful years through a character of each of the ages between sixteen and twenty-four-ages oft tick-boxed together. Set in shiny cities, stuffy universities and other alternative...

Singapore, 1951. When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed. What happens next will determine the lives of generations to come. New Zealand, 1984. Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not w...

It's midnight on Ana Koehl's sixtieth birthday, and she is taking stock. Nine years have passed since she last had sex with her kind-hearted but pot-addicted husband, seven since she began an affair with a magnetic gonzo journalist. She's gratified by her work as a book doula, yes, but equally bu...

From Russia's Anna Karenina to Vietnam's Lady Trieu, from Cio-Cio-San to Frankenstein's second creature, suffering, madness, or death is the fate of far too many women in classic literature. Anna Karenina Isn't Dead undoes that. In this anthology of literary women, these women live. Do they have ...

How do you help the people you love create a future you're proud to leave behind? As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed gener...

Mornington Peninsula, 1999: Wife and now grandmother Joan has checked into the grand old Duchess Hotel to find herself again, having spent thirty-five years being who her husband and family have wanted her to be. Peninsula local and soon-to-be octogenarian Frances is distracting herself from gett...

When Mac first opens his classroom copy of Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic and finds some words blacked out, he thinks it must be a mistake. But then when he and his friends discover what the missing words are, he's outraged. Someone in his school is trying to prevent kids from reading the fu...

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young - young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this novel two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our underst...

Shifts in tone, setting and narration create a sense of the uncanny in Beam of Light, Kinsella's haunting collection of stories. A man is disturbed by the sight of a familiar dining table and chairs atop an impending bonfire of bulldozed trees, a girl finds a fox skeleton and feels compelled to p...

In the Montana backcountry live two brothers who run a saw mill and do a little poaching on the side. Thad is the brains of the operation. His brother Hazen has a talent for tracking and hunting and getting himself into trouble. Together they have just about made it work, but now there are mounti...

Sarah Toomey is afraid she's losing her mind. Ever since her mother's death, she's found herself acting upon strange urges, losing track of time, and coming to in odd places. There's a dark force that seems to be haunting her, and leaving death in its wake. Yvonne Howard has reinvented herself. A...

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses...

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is ...

In the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, the mysterious cafe where customers arrive hoping to travel in time welcomes four new guests: - The father who could not allow his daughter to get married - A woman who couldn't give Valentine's Day chocolates to her loved ...

Elom can't make sense of love. It's like a language he can't speak, though he's heard the words before. He wants to feel understood by his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his self-assured partner Ben, and his boisterous friends but he never knows the right thing to say. How can you know ...

Like the rising water from Hurricane Katrina, onto Eric's street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless r...

This is a compelling debut that fearlessly challenges stereotypes surrounding Palestinian culture. With humour and poignancy, this book delves into the intimate lives of three primary Palestinian immigrant families in America - the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars - whose destinies and strug...

Heather Russo is miserable - work is non-stop, and her love life is in tatters. But she's not the only one struggling. Her mother, Sandy, is finally separating from Heather's womanising father, while her grandmother, Bonnie, is grieving her third husband by carrying his urn everywhere she goes......

Penang, 1971. When Suyin Lim is offered the opportunity of a lifetime, a place as a trainee nurse in London's Bethnal Green Hospital, she jumps at the chance to leave her job as a seamstress and unite with her sister, who left for the same path a year before. However, without warning her sister r...

Grace and Izzy are twins-identical twins -- and they're closer than BFFs. But even though they look alike, they're not similar at all! It's Harmony Day at Rocky Point Primary, and Izzy and Grace are entering the best presentation competition. But when the girls choose the same topic, the battle b...

Birdie's keeping it together, of course she is. So she's a little hungover on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter to the lodge while she waits tables, but Emaleen never goes hungry. It's a tough town to be a single mother, and Birdie just needs to get by. And then Birdie meets Arthur, who i...

It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine, surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering and strange outbursts, while her brother Mamdouh tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Marian,...