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The Almost Truth

Anne Hamilton

When Alina’s son, Fin, traces his long-absent birth father, it’s the catalyst for decades of secrets to implode in Alina’s neatly ordered life.

With the sudden appearance of another old flame, Rory, and the ever-present pull of a very different life in Bangladesh, she’s left reeling.

Three relationships, all of them built on half-truths. All Alina can truly be sure of, is that you can choose your family, you just can’t choose who they will turn out to be.

A compelling story of family, secrets, identity, and a reminder that love and life can surprise you… right until the very end.

Honor the Dead

Amy Tector

Speak for the Dead

Amy Tector

More than ten years after The Foulest Things murder and mayhem return to Ottawa in the highly-anticipated next installment of Amy Tector’s acclaimed Dominion Archives Mystery series.

It’s a stormy summer day when Ottawa coroner Dr. Cate Spencer is called to the scene of an alleged suicide. Inside a narrow vault in the Dominion Archives’ nitrate film storage facility—kept separate from the rest of the collection due to its dangerous combustibility—officers pressure Cate to rule the death a suicide. When parts of the scene don’t add up and a deliberately set spark threatens her life, Cate suspects that this death might be a murder.

Cate’s tough façade masks a deep compassion for the victims she examines. Whether she’s looking for answers because of her dedication to justice or to distract herself from anguish over her brother’s recent death, her inquiries plunge her into a world of military secrets, contentious Indigenous protests, and a seventy-year-old mystery with deadly implications. Will Cate manage to pull herself away from her scotch and grief to expose an explosive historic secret and solve a murder the police doubt even exists?

Arrested Song

Irena Karafilly

‘A very accomplished novel’ Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin
‘Hard to put this book down’ Sofka Zinovieff
‘An epic, page turning story, of longing and bravery... a must read’ Nadia Marks

Calliope is a young schoolmistress in the village of Molyvos when Hitler’s army invades Greece in 1941. Recruited by the Germans to act as their liaison officer, Calliope’s wartime duties bring her into close contact with Lieutenant Lorenz Umbreit, the Wehrmacht commander. In a fishing village seething with dread and suspicion, their intimacy begins to blossom. But as an active member of the Greek Resistance, how long can their relationship last?

Arrested Song is a sumptuous, sweeping romance, weaving the private and the historic into a vivid tapestry of Greek island life. Spanning over three decades, it chronicles the story of an extraordinary woman and her lifelong struggle against tyranny.

Eton Rogue

William Coles

‘A delicious tale in which class, politics, and a toxic press all jostle for our horrified attention’ Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

Eton Rogue is a hilarious and shocking story of scandal and rebellion – all set in the heart of the world’s most famous school, Eton College.

Meet our Eton Rogue: Seventeen-year-old Cary, now embarking on his extraordinary final year at Eton. Prince William has joined the school and the British tabloids are ravenous for headlines. Cary is the mole who’s making thousands selling stories to the Sun newspaper - and while he’s at it, he’s secretly dating a housemaster’s daughter.

Based on true events, the rule of Eton Rogue is simple: The more outrageous the tale, the greater the chances that it actually occurred.

The Foulest Things

Amy Tector

Get ready for a thrilling new mystery series from the author of The Honeybee Emeralds

Ottawa, January 2010. Canada’s historic Dominion Archives.

Junior archivist Jess Novak is struggling to find her footing in her new role. Her colleagues undermine her, her boss hates her, and her only romantic prospect hides a whiskey bottle in his desk. Desperate to make a good impression, Jess’s prospects begin to change when she discovers a series of mysterious letters chronicling life in Paris at the start of the Great War. Thinking she has landed her ticket to career advancement, Jess dives into research in Dominion’s art vault, where she stumbles upon the body of one of her colleagues.

As if finding a corpse isn’t frightening enough, Jess soon notices she is being stalked by a menacing figure. It’s only when Jess makes the connection between the letters, the murder, and a priceless Rembrandt that she realizes just how high the stakes are. Can Jess salvage her career, unravel a World War I–era mystery, shake off her ominous stalker, solve a murder, and—oh yeah—save her own life before it’s too late?

Why Fast?

Christine Baumgarthuber

A sober engagement with the diverse meanings of intermittent fasting in human culture.
 
Fasting from food is a controversial, dangerous, and yet utterly normal human practice. In Why Fast?, Christine Baumgarthuber engages our fascination with restrictive eating in cultural history. If fasting offers few health benefits, why do people fast? Why have we always fasted? Does fasting speak to something deep and immutable within us? Why are our bodies so well adapted to intermittent fasting? And, what might this ancient, ascetic ritual offer us today? Thoughtful and considered, Why Fast? is a sober reconsideration of a contentious practice.

Root Cause

Steven Laine

Can you imagine a world without wine?

Corvina Guerra is a flying winemaker who dreams of one day settling down in her native Italy on her family's vineyard. On a visit to a vineyard in Italy, Corvina makes a startling discovery: Phylloxera, a menacing plant louse that devastated vineyards in Europe more than a hundred years ago, has infested the vines.

The deeper Corvina and Brian search, the more they become convinced that Universal Wines holds the answer to everything, and the harder they pursue their investigation the more surprises pile up for both of them.

In spite of devastating consequences, Corvina and Brian vow to continue their investigation and do what they can to contain the spread of the infestation - but time is running short and they always seem to be a step behind. Unless they can find a way to stop the Philomena - vineyards around the world will be ruined for decades; potentially causing the collapse of the wine industry. Can Corvina and Brian get to the root cause and save the international wine industry from ruin?

Neighborhood Watch

Sarah Reida

A killer terrorizes the morally bankrupt residents of an upscale neighborhood, leading them to turn to—and on—one another to survive.

The neighborhood of Oleander Court is the poster child for suburban bliss. The residents compare lawns beautified by hired help. They monitor home values. They toss perfect furniture because they wanted tapioca, not beige.

But when a string of murders rips through the neighborhood, suspicions abound as new secrets come to light. And as more and more bodies are taken away, it becomes clear that the killer is strategically selecting each and every victim, picking off the shallowest, most wasteful of the lot in spectacular fashion and leaving everyone in the neighborhood to wonder: Who’s next?

While most of their neighbors scatter like well-dressed cockroaches, a small group of the neighborhood ladies team up to solve their local mystery and restore their once-peaceful lives. But is this ragtag collection of amateur sleuths truly a united front? With reputations, freedom, and personal sanity on the line, the ladies must unmask the killer . . . even if the killer is among them.

Foreign Seed

Allison Alsup

"I got completely and gratefully lost in its rich setting and memorable characters. You will, too." —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Somebody’s Fool

Equal parts mystery and epic novel inspired by historical events, Foreign Seed plunges readers into the search for a man who seems to vanish out of thin air.

China, June 1918. 

When the explorer Frank Meyer suddenly disappears from a ferry on the Yangtze River, American Vice-Consul Samuel Sokobin is tasked with finding the missing man. By the time Sokobin receives the case, four days have passed since Meyer was last seen on the vast river. With no clues to guide his search and fearing failure in his new post as a man of rank, Sokobin heads upriver with Mr. Lin, a Chinese interpreter he’s never met. The investigation soon turns deeply personal for Sokobin, who can’t help but conflate Meyer’s fate with that of his own daring younger brother—a fighter pilot gone MIA in the world war. As Sokobin continues to search for answers, this mental connection threatens to break him, and he’s forced to contend with the biggest question of all: what do we do when the answers we most desperately seek are the very ones that elude us?

A sweeping tale of loss and grief, Foreign Seed is a moving testament to friendship, faith, and the resilience of the human spirit. Allison Alsup’s exquisitely-researched debut novel will stay in readers’ hearts and minds long after they’ve turned the last page.

You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant

Brad Neely

A comically unorthodox “biography”

Spanning from the birth of Ulysses S. Grant until his victory over the Confederacy, You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant gives us an honest portrait of an American hero who struggled to balance love, soldiering, and the attainment of the American Dream—all relatable struggles for readers today, if not for the soldiering part…

Taking the accessible, pop history of Coe’s You Never Forget Your First and adding more of the nerdy, punk humor of Rainn Wilson or Judd Apatow, You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant is for both history and humor readers alike. Examining the validity of biography by hilariously breaking all the form's rules, this book removes the pomp to deliver a hopeful message of human potential: that the heroes we now venerate were also flawed, flesh and blood individuals and that we, too, are never too small to achieve great things. 

Poor Ghost

David Starkey

The Next Great Rock and Roll Novel 

On a September afternoon in Santa Barbara, a private jet carrying the members of Poor Ghost—one of America’s most storied rock bands—plunges into the backyard of Caleb Crane, a retired insurance salesman. Still mourning his wife’s death from Covid, Caleb finds himself navigating trauma, grief, and loss, all while his quiet neighborhood is invaded by pushy reporters and rabid Poor Ghost fans.

For fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six and its fictional documentary structure, Poor Ghost moves back and forth between the impact of the plane crash on Caleb’s life and an oral history of Poor Ghost—from its beginnings as a working-class punk band to rock icons. As the twisting and turning strands of the plot converge, readers are shown what happens when different worlds (literally) collide with one another, and how we view, negotiate, argue with, and aid those who are unlike us.