Bøger i Essential Prose serien

Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free--or else lose everything. Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope. With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.

The devil, a ghost, a doppelganger, a selkie, a hobgoblin - these creatures appear in Marianne Micros's Statue, a collection of tales which combine traditional and ancient elements with contemporary issues and experiences. These fifteen stories show that the boundaries between fantasy and reality, art and life, life and death are fragile and inconstant. Micros seamlessly combines magic with the realities of daily life, showing the interrelationship of the natural and the supernatural and the significance of those interactions

Love and Rain is a novel which explores the nature of love, its pain, and the near impossibility of its enduring happiness. Moving back in space and time from Rome to Montreal in the sixties and seventies, it also traces the individual rebellion and social revolution that marked the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy in the late 1970s. The power of love, music and politics intertwine in a tale that spells the mysterious alchemy of fate and chance.

The B-Side of Daniel Garneau concludes a rollicking three-book series set in Toronto featuring the misadventures of boyfriends Daniel and David, their eccentric family and friends. As Daniel prepares to graduate from med school and propose marriage, David sets out to donate his sperm so his brother can have a baby. But as his celebrity ex, Marcus, launches his boldest exhibit yet, an unexpected crisis forces Daniel to re-evaluate his priorities in life.The B-Side of Daniel Garneau is the inspirational follow-up to A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018) and Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020). At turns both comic and tragic, it is a celebration of queer identities and non-traditional families, as Daniel struggles to discover himself and his path in the world. At its heart, it is a philosophical reflection on acceptance and living with courage and love.

Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai's half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.

Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.

This flip book is comprised of two novellas: In Sickness and In Health - Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be "normal". By age 45 she has a "normal" life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love. Yom Kippur in a Gym - Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can't accept her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, is planning suicide. Rachel worries about losing her job. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.

Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these brilliant stories she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like to struggle to find your place in the world. From the bullied twelve-year-old (Born, Not Made) to the musician saved from sleeping in doorways (Blasting Molly Rockets), to the sculptor who builds a golem and fulfills her Holocaust survivor grandmother's wish to protect her sister (Able to Pass) to a student who overdoses on opiates and meets an adult Anne Frank (Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish), these stories pulse with Botha's signature empathy and originality. Botha also addresses what it means to be Jewish, with characters who rethink their whole identity (Soulmates) to those who hold on at all costs (Dark and Lilac Fairies). As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh and cry, but above all it will make you feel less alone.

A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father's glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.