A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory-a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life. Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage...

"It is Olivia's birthday, and when she blows out the candles on her cake and makes a wish-she gets exactly what she wanted!"--

After the mysterious death of her father and a sudden move back to her native Canada in 1985, sixteen-year-old Freya feels distant and disoriented until she meets Garren and begins remembering their shared past, despite the efforts of some powerful people to keep them from learning the truth.

"A young boy volunteering at a retirement home finds a stray dog and notices that it revives decades-old memories for a bitter resident. The boy bonds with the resident as he listens to stories about growing up in Saskatchewan during the Great Depression. Thanks to his new friend and his canine companion, the elderly man is able to pass away peacefully, immersed in fond memories of his youth."--

"In a last-ditch effort to rescue her brand from the brink of irrelevance, Boston fashion influencer Melanie Karlsen finds herself in a rural fishing village on the east coast of Canada. The only thing scarier than nature itself? The burly and bearded B and B owner and fisherman, Evan Whaler--who single-handedly disproves the theory that Canadians are "nice." After a boating accident lands Evan unconscious in the hospital, Mel is mistaken for his...

"Powerful stories of "Metis futurism" that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization. "Education is the new buffalo" is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is...

"When a Nigerian woman falls for a man she knows will break her mother's heart, she must choose between love and her family. At twelve years old, Azere promised her dying father she would marry a Nigerian man and preserve her culture, even after immigrating to Canada. Her mother has been vigilant about helping - well, forcing - her to stay within the Nigerian dating pool ever since. But when another match-made-by-mom goes wrong, Azere ends up at a...

"Adrien Lockman is through with the political unrest and bloodshed in his home country of France, so he sets off to the Canadian territory's mountain frontier, in search of a place where a man can live his own life in peace. The last thing he expects to find is a woman, half-starved and half-frozen in a shack nestled among the towering peaks of the great Rocky Mountains. Mary Standish thought she'd finally found a place where she was accepted, trapping...

"Set in a small Nova Scotia town settled by former slaves, [the novel] depicts several generations of one family bound together and torn apart by blood, faith, time, and fate. Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family--Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner--whose lives unfold against the tumultuous events of the twentieth century from the Great Depression of the 1930s, through...

"For readers of Khaled Hosseini and Chris Cleave, The Boat People is an extraordinary novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage only to face the threat of deportation amid accusations of terrorism. When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches Vancouver's shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead,...