This latest novel from Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Linden MacIntyre, Why Men Lie, offers a moving and emotionally complex conclusion to the Cape Breton trilogy.
 
Two years after the events of The Bishop's Man, we're introduced to Effie MacAskill Gillis, sister of the troubled priest Duncan. It's 1997, and Effie is an independent, middle-aged woman working as a tenured professor of Celtic Studies, but her complicated and often disappointing love life has left her all but ready to give up on the opposite sex. Then suddenly, a chance encounter with a man on a Toronto subway platform gives Effie renewed hope. J.C. Campbell is an old friend she hasn't seen for more than 20 years - an attractive, single man who appears to possess the stability and good sense she longs for.
 
Effie met her last husband, Sextus, in her hometown of Cape Breton when the two were still children. As they grew older together, and started a family, she soon learned that when it came to other women, Sextus couldn't be trusted. After one too many betrayals, Effie leaves him behind, and so when she and J.C. seem to hit it off, his relaxed, open demeanour is a welcome change.
 
But after a happy start to their relationship, cracks begin to show, and J.C. proves himself to be just as unpredictable as the others: one evening Effie spots him in a seedy part of town, but he denies ever having left his house; when she notices a scratch below his eye, he lies about its cause, blaming it on the cat. Then J.C., a journalist, becomes unhealthily engrossed in a story involving a convict on death row, and he and Effie begin to drift apart.
 
Although he still checks in sporadically and insists there's nothing going on, she soon learns he has a deeply personal reason for his covert trips to that seedy downtown street. In fact, it turns out there's a lot about his past that Effie doesn't know, and a lot he's still learning himself.
 
While J.C. is busy chasing his own past, Effie is rarely able to escape her own. Family ties and hometown connections to Cape Breton mean her two ex-husbands - Sextus happens to be the cousin of her first husband, John - are constantly coming and going in a turbulent mess of comfort and commotion, while her grown daughter, Cassie, brings some unexpected news of her own.
 
After all of her experience in relationships with men, Effie thought she knew all she needed to about what to expect, and how to maintain her self-sufficiency. Why do men lie?, she wants to know. But whether it's for love, for protection, or for more selfish reasons, Effie soon learns that no amount of experience can prepare you for what might resurface from the past, and for the damage that might cause, emotionally or otherwise.

From Giller Prize winner, internationally acclaimed, and bestselling author Vincent Lam comes a superbly crafted, highly suspenseful, and deeply affecting novel set against the turmoil of the Vietnam War.
 
Percival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English school in Saigon. He is also a bon vivant, a compulsive gambler and an incorrigible womanizer. He is well accustomed to bribing a forever-changing list of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of the Chen Academy. He is fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, and quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided country. He devotedly ignores all news of the fighting that swirls around him, choosing instead to read the faces of his opponents at high-stakes mahjong tables. But when his only son gets in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities, Percival faces the limits of his connections and wealth and is forced to send him away. In the loneliness that follows, Percival finds solace in Jacqueline, a beautiful woman of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage, and Laing Jai, a son born to them on the eve of the Tet offensive. Percival''s new-found happiness is precarious, and as the complexities of war encroach further and further into his world, he must confront the tragedy of all he has refused to see.
 
Blessed with intriguingly flawed characters moving through a richly drawn historical and physical landscape, The Headmaster''s Wager is a riveting story of love, betrayal and sacrifice.

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

 

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero''s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris - where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance - Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

 

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

 

Henry's second novel, written, like his first, under a pen name, had done well.
 
Yann Martel's astonishing new novel begins with a successful writer attempting to publish his latest book, made up of a novel and an essay. Henry plans for it to be a "flip book" that the reader can start at either end, reading the novel or the essay first, because both pieces are equally concerned with representations of the Holocaust. His aim is to give the most horrifying of tragedies "a new choice of stories," in order that it be remembered anew and in more than one way.
 
But no one is sympathetic to his provocative idea. What is your book about? his editor repeatedly asks. Should it be placed in the fiction section of a bookstore or with the non-fiction books? a bookseller asks. And where will the barcode go? To them, Henry's book is an unpublishable disaster. Faced with severe and categorical rejection, Henry gives up hope. He abandons writing, moves with his wife to a foreign city, joins a community theatre, becomes a waiter in a chocolatería. But then he receives a package containing a scene from a play, photocopies from a short story by Flaubert - about a man who hunts animals down relentlessly - and a short note: "I need your help."
 
Intrigued, Henry tracks down his correspondent, and finds himself in a strange part of the city, walking past a stuffed okapi into a taxidermist's workshop. The taxidermist - also named Henry - says he has been working on his play, A 20th-Century Shirt, for most of his life, but now he needs Henry's help to describe his characters: the play's protagonists are a stuffed donkey and a howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil, respectively, and Henry's successful book was in part about animals. He wants help to finish his play and, we may suspect, free himself from it. And though his new acquaintance is austere, abrupt and almost unearthly, Henry the writer is drawn more and more deeply into Henry the taxidermist's uncompromising world.
 
The same goes for the reader. The more we read of the play within the novel, the more we find out about the lives of Beatrice and Virgil - in a series of initially funny, and then increasingly harrowing dialogues - the more troubling their story becomes. As we are drawn deeper into their disturbing moral fable, the relationship between the two faltering writers named Henry becomes more and more complex until it can only be resolved in an explosive, unexpected catastrophe.
 
Though Beatrice & Virgil is initially as wry and engaging as anything Yann Martel has written, this book gradually grows into something more, a shattering and ultimately transfixing work that asks searching questions about the nature of our understanding of history, the meaning of suffering and the value of art. Together it is a pioneeringly original and profoundly moving accomplishment, one that meets Kafka's description of what a book should be: the axe for the frozen sea within us.

In The Guilty Plea and Old City Hall, critically acclaimed author Robert Rotenberg created gripping page-turners that captured audiences in Canada and around the world. Rotenberg's bestsellers do for Toronto what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh and Michael Connelly for Los Angeles.

In Stray Bullets, Rotenberg takes the reader to a snowy November evening. Outside a busy downtown doughnut shop, gunshots ring out and a young boy is critically hurt. Soon Detective Ari Greene is on scene. How many shots were fired? How many guns? How many witnesses?

With grieving parents and a city hungry for justice, the pressure is on to convict the man accused of this horrible crime. Against this tidal wave of indignation, defense counsel Nancy Parish finds herself defending her oldest and most difficult client.

But does anyone know the whole story?

Stray Bullets is Robert Rotenberg's third intricate mystery set on the streets and in the courtrooms of Toronto.

At work, at home, and everywhere in between, we need to persuade others every day. To give us a job. To award us the account. To give us the first available appointment. Problem is, no one ever taught us how to persuade. Until now. At thirty-one, Arlene Dickinson was going nowhere, fast. Recently divorced, she had a high school diploma, no savings and no clue how she was going to feed four young children. But just one year later, she was a partner in Venture Communications. Ten years on, she was CEO, poised to grow the business into one of Canada ’s largest independently owned marketing firms. Today, as a co-star of the CBC hit Dragons' Den , she is one of the country’s most sought-after female entrepreneurs. The secret of her journey from poverty to the corner office? The art of persuasion. Persuasion has become a dirty word; all snake oil and high-pressure tactics. But Arlene argues that true persuasion is about connecting, not conning. It’s about cultivating authenticity, honesty and reciprocity in every relationship so you not only get what you want, but achieve an outcome that works for everyone. She’ll show you how nothing can replace proper preparation, how a great pitch involves far more listening than talking, and how the art of storytelling is crucial to convincing others that you understand the bigger picture and that your way is the right way. Anyone can be persuasive but that process begins with persuading yourself of your own potential. Mastering the art of principled persuasion changed Arlene Dickinson’s life, both personally and as a professional marketer. Let her show you how it can change yours, too.  

A newsmaking exposé about why Canada''s financial industry is a haven for fraud.
 
Beneath the veneer of stability that saw Canada''s banking sector through the financial crash of 2008, investigative reporter Bruce Livesey has uncovered a rampant failure of epidemic proportions. Though no large financial institution has recently gone bust in this country, white-collar criminals, scam artists, Ponzi schemers and organized crime, from the Hells Angels to the Russian mafia, know that Canada is the place in the Western world to rip off investors. And the fraudsters do so with little fear of being caught and punished.
 
Thieves of Bay Street investigates Canada''s biggest financial scandals of recent years. Readers will learn what banks do with investors'' money and what happens when they lose it. They will meet the bogus investment gurus, the brokers who lose money with both reckless abandon and impunity, the bankers who squander money in toxic investments, the lawyers who protect them and the regulators who do nothing to keep them from doing it again. And most importantly, they''ll meet the victims who are demanding that our vaunted banking sector finally come clean on its dirtiest secret.

Selected as the 2011 CBC Canada Reads Winner!

This book beat out work by Douglas Coupland and Will Ferguson 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.

The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing. Dora becomes Miss B.'s apprentice, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labours, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives. Filled with details as compelling as they are surprising, The Birth House is an unforgettable tale of the struggles women have faced to have control of their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.


From the Hardcover edition.

Kevin O'Leary shares invaluable secrets on entrepreneurship, business, money and life.
 
Can you make millions just by "visualizing yourself rich" as some business prophets suggest? Don't buy it, says Kevin O'Leary. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur and amass wealth, you're going to have to work for it. But the good news is: with the right guidance, focus and perseverance, you can turn entrepreneurial vision into lucrative reality and have the personal freedom that only wealth can buy.  

Kevin O'Leary would know. The much-feared and revered Dragon on the immensely popular show Dragons' Den (and Shark Tank in the U.S.) started his company in his basement with a $10,000 loan from his financially savvy mother. A few years later, Kevin sold that company for more than four billion dollars. In this compelling, candid and, above all else, brutally honest business memoir, Kevin provides engaging, practical advice and lessons that will give anyone a distinct competitive edge.

The ultimate CBC insider exposes the controversies, successes and dead ends of his time at the top.

In 2004, CBC television had sunk to its lowest audience share in its history. That same year, Richard Stursberg, an avowed popularizer with a reputation for radical action, was hired to run English services. With incisive wit, Stursberg tells the story of the struggle that resulted -- a struggle that lasted for six turbulent and controversial years.

Shortly after Stursberg arrived, the corporation locked out its employees for two months. Four years later, he signed the most harmonious labour contract to date. He lost the television rights for the 2010 and 2012 Olympic Games. He won the biggest NHL contract in history. He had unprecedented ratings successes. He had terrible flops. He enjoyed the best radio, television and online ratings in CBC''s history. He fought endless wars with the CBC president and board about the direction of the corporation and ultimately was dismissed.

This is the story of our most loved and reviled cultural institution during its most convulsive and far-reaching period of change. It is for those who think the CBC has lost its way, those who love where it is, and those who think it should not exist in the first place.

The thirteenth in Gail Bowen''s beloved and award-winning Joanne Kilbourn mystery series promises to be the best of them all: some very bad things happen very, very close to home, and Joanne may never be quite the same again.
 
"Security for any one of us lies in greater abundance for all of us." For many years, this was the core of Joanne''s political beliefs, but for a number of reasons, she has drifted away from it. But on the day Joanne retires from her university teaching post, she has a dream about her first husband (murdered many years ago), and this line comes back vividly in it.
 
Soon, she is forced to experience the truth of what, for most of her life, had just been a good closing line for a political speech. The night after Jo and Zack have dinner with Zack''s colleague Margot and one of his law firm''s biggest clients, the developer Leland Hunter, Jo and Zack''s house is blown up. They''re at the lake with daughter Taylor and their dogs, but the house is destroyed. And that is only the first of several terrible incidents. It isn''t long before Joanne is witness to events far more distressing than even a destroyed home. She begins to understand what it''s like to live in a world where she can count on nothing.