Publisher: Mira
Publication Date: January 1, 2007
ISBN-10: 0778324133
ISBN-13: 978-0778324133Check Availability


When Liz Talbot's husband left her for a woman half her age, Liz put all her passions into her bakery. The problem is that fad diets and fitness crazes are ruining sales and she's barely staying afloat. Liz's luck seems to be changing when her ex dies without changing his will, leaving her the main beneficiary. Unfortunately one of the things she inherits is the advertising agency she left behind to pursue her dream of baking. Her partner? The newly widowed husband stealer--Brandi, with a heart over the i. As the new co-owner of Talbot Advertising, in the toilet since the death of her ex (that's right, she's now the proprietor of two failing businesses), Liz is more determined than ever to break out and make a name for herself as an artisan baker extraordinaire, providing her products can catch the eye of the Nabisco Food scout who is as elusive as he is mysterious.

Publisher: Touchstone
Publication Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN-10: 1416532196
ISBN-13: 978-1416532194

Publisher: Emblem Editions
Publication Date: September 5, 2008
ISBN-10: 0771047584
ISBN-13: 978-0771047589

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This book beat out work by Douglas Coupland and Will Ferguson to win the Stephen Leacock Award because it is very, very good - a terrific Canadian political satire.

Here's the set up: A burnt-out politcal aide quits just before an election - but is forced to run a hopeless campaign on the way out. He makes a deal with a crusty old Scot, Angus McLintock - an engineering professor who will do anything, anything, to avoid teaching English to engineers - to let his name stand in the election. No need to campaign, certain to lose, and so on.

Then a great scandal blows away his opponent, and to their horror, Angus is elected. He decides to see what good an honest M.P. who doesn't care about being re-elected can do in Parliament. The results are hilarious - and with chess, a hovercraft, and the love of a good woman thrown in, this very funny book has something for everyone.

Publisher: Touchstone
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
ISBN-10: 1416543767
ISBN-13: 978-1416543763
Literary Fiction
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Annie, Jake and Mason-friends practically from the womb-have developed a fraught dynamic sharply affected by competitiveness, attraction and jealousy. The book's opening trauma-Mason's suicide-serves as a springboard for Hegi to delve into the friends' tangled past: Mason and Annie get married the same night Annie's father and very pregnant mother die in a car wreck. The baby, Opal, survives, and the three friends raise her. But festering attractions-Mason to Jake; Jake to Annie-lead Mason to cross a line, Annie to want out of the marriage and Jake to fail to act at a pivotal moment. Woven into the mix is the post-WWII story of Annie's immigrant mother, Lotte, and her friend Mechthild, who came to America from Germany to work as au pairs and pretended to be Dutch to avoid persecution. Though a bumper crop of tragedy weighs heavily on this controlled and articulate novel, Hegi (Sacred Time) is an accomplished storyteller; she inhabits different characters and blends the past with the present to tell a rich story of love, death, loyalty and survival.

Publisher: Penguin Canada
Publication Date: September 2008
ISBN-10: 0670063630
ISBN-13: 978-0670063635
Literary Fiction
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Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to sit beside his bed. Broken in different ways, the two take silent communion in their unspoken kinship, and the story that unfolds is rife with heartbreak, fierce love, ancient blood feuds, mysterious disappearances, fires, plane crashes, murders, and the bonds that hold a family, and a people, together. As Will and Annie reveal their secrets-the tragic betrayal that cost Will his family, Annie's desperate search for her missing sister, the famous model Suzanne-a remarkable saga of resilience and destiny takes shape. From the dangerous bush country of upper Canada to the drug-fueled glamour of the Manhattan club scene, Joseph Boyden tracks his characters with a keen eye for the telling detail and a rare empathy for the empty places concealed within the heart.

In 1973, outside of Kenora, Ontario, Raymond Seymour, an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy, is taken by a local policeman to a remote island and left for dead.

A year later, the Byrd family arrives in Kenora. They have come to stay at "the Retreat," a commune run by the self-styled guru Doctor Amos. The Doctor is an enigmatic man who spouts bewildering truisms, and who bathes naked every morning in the pond at the edge of the Retreat while young Everett Byrd watches from the bushes. Lizzy, the eldest of the Byrd children, cares for her younger brothers Fish and William, and longs for what she cannot find at the Retreat. When Lizzy meets Raymond, everything changes, and Lizzy comes to understand the real difference between Raymond's world and her own. A tragedy and a love story, the novel moves towards a conclusion that is both astonishing and heartbreaking.

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
ISBN-10: 1400063973
ISBN-13: 978-1400063970

Publisher: Bantam Discovery
Publication Date: February 26, 2008
ISBN-10: 0385340125
ISBN-13: 978-0385340120

Publisher: Knopf Canada
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
ISBN-10: 0307396991
ISBN-13: 978-0307396990
Mystery
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Isabel's incandescent curiosity is piqued when she is asked to help a professor of medicine who has been disgraced by allegations of scientific fraud concerning a newly marketed drug. Would a doctor with a stellar reputation make such a simple but grave mistake? If not, what explains the tragic accident that resulted in the death of a patient?

An investigation is in order, especially since a man's reputation is in jeopardy, and a great deal of money is at stake for the pharmaceutical company involved.

She's also occupied by the envy she feels in the face of Jamie's new friendship with the composer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh. Whatever the case, whatever the solution, Isabel's combination of spirit, smarts, curiosity, empathy and unabashed nosiness guarantees a delightful adventure.

Publisher: Atria
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
ISBN-10: 1416550402
ISBN-13: 978-1416550402
Spy / Thriller

Publisher: Renouf Pub Co Ltd
Publication Date: September 18, 2008
ISBN-10: 067006906X
ISBN-13: 978-0670069064Roth's brilliant and disconcerting new novel plumbs the depths of the early Cold War-era male libido, burdened as it is with sexual myths and a consciousness overloaded with vivid images of impending death, either by the bomb or in Korea. At least this is the way things appear to narrator Marcus Messner, the 19-year-old son of a Newark kosher butcher. Perhaps because Marcus's dad saw his two brothers' only sons die in WWII, he becomes an overprotective paranoid when Marcus turns 18, prompting Marcus to flee to Winesburg College in Ohio.

Though the distance helps, Marcus, too, is haunted by the idea that flunking out of college means going to Korea. His first date in Winesburg is with doctor's daughter Olivia Hutton, who would appear to embody the beautiful normality Marcus seeks, but, instead, she destroys Marcus's sense of normal by surprising him after dinner with her carnal prowess. Slightly unhinged by this stroke of fortune, he at first shuns her, then pesters her with letters and finally has a brief but nonpenetrative affair with her.

Olivia, he discovers, is psychologically fragile and bears scars from a suicide attempt-a mark Marcus's mother zeroes in on when she meets the girl for the first and last time. Between promising his mother to drop her and longing for her, Marcus goes through a common enough existential crisis, exacerbated by run-ins with the school administration over trivial matters that quickly become more serious.... The terrible sadness of Marcus's life is rendered palpable by Roth's fierce grasp on the psychology of this butcher's boy, down to his bought-for-Winesburg wardrobe. It's a melancholy triumph and a cogent reflection on society in a time of war.