Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Cutting all ties, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. Funny, aggressive, fearless and vulnerable, Benny is a road-warrior with a backpack of opiates, a map and a guileless sense of naiveté. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humour and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.

These twelve linked stories confirm what we’ve suspsected all along: eventually we all outsmart our parents. In this brilliant debut collection by Debbie Howlett we return to the turbulent 70s revisiting the bittersweet wonder years of Diane Wilkinson, a precocious teen living in suburban Montreal amidst the Catholic/Protestant, Federalist/Separatist split that foreshadowed the October Crisis. Against this backdrop of upheaval, Diane quietly chooses sides in her own domestic battles and armed with deadpan humour she protests her drunken father’s hapless philandering, her uncle’s half-cocked scams, her brother’s dimwitted nosiness and her mother’s silent acquiescence.We Could Stay Here All Night captures the coming of age of a country as much as of a characterand hboth badly need to grow up. Diane soon comes to recognize, as we all must, that the line between adolescence and adulthood is one of convenience, and that the frantic search for love is no less desperate at 12 than it is at 40. Readers will want to curl up with these stories and stay all night.

Emily has finally finished high school in the small town where she has lived her whole life. At last, she thinks, her adult life can begin.But what if you have no idea what you want your new life to look like? What then?While Lincoln gets ready to go backpacking in Australia, Melissa packs for university on the east coast, and a new guy named Tyler provides welcome distraction, Emily wonders whether she will end up working forever at Pamela’s Country Catering, cutting the crusts off party sandwiches and stuffing mushrooms. Is this her future? Being known forever as the local girl whose mother abandoned her in the worst way possible all those years ago? Visiting her spacey grandmother, watching nature shows on TV with her dad and hanging out with Robert the grocery clerk? Listening to the distant hum of the highway leading out of the town everyone can’t wait to leave? With poetic prose and a keen eye for the quirks and ironies of small-town life, Jane Ozkowski captures the bittersweet uncertainty of that weird, unreal summer after high school — a time that is full of possibility and completely terrifying at the same time.

Set in a small northern town, under the mythical shadow of the Sleeping Giant, Wake the Stone Man follows the complicated friendship of two girls coming of age in the 1960s. Molly meets Nakina, who is Ojibwe and a survivor of the residential school system, in high school, and they form a strong friendship. As the bond between them grows, Molly, who is not native, finds herself a silent witness to the racism and abuse her friend must face each day. In this time of political awakening, Molly turns to her camera to try to make sense of the intolerance she sees in the world around her. Her photos become a way to freeze time and observe the complex human politics of her hometown. Her search for understanding uncovers some hard truths about Nakina's past and leaves Molly with a growing sense of guilt over her own silence. When personal tragedy tears them apart, Molly must travel a long hard road in search of forgiveness and friendship.

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field, an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, one of the town's women decides to take matters into her own hands, setting the stage for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.

As Rebecca is about to turn twelve years old, she begins to realize that Joe, her father, is not the most supportive of parents. Rather he seems to want to turn her away from friendships, from involvement with others, from anyone who might intrude on their two lives. When it seems their affectionate neighbour is becoming too inquisitive, Joe abruptly arranges for himself and Rebecca to make a quick move to another place in the city. And as she reflects on things, Rebecca realizes that this is what has always happened. Also, she doesn't attend school, but is doing what her dad calls home-schooling. When she asks him about her family — grandparents and others — turns out that they're all dead. For various reasons, as Joe explains. That means the two of them are alone in the world, making their own way. Or, perhaps, allowing Joe to make whatever moves he wishes to without consulting anyone else — least of all, his daughter. Life changes for Rebecca the day that she spots a new neighbour in their latest apartment building — someone who, though she seems a little fragile, has an aura of elegance about her and who also takes an immediate interest in the girl. As Rebecca gets to know Phoebe better, she also is able to look at Joe with different eyes — and, in the end, she realizes that her father is not at all who he has presented himself as.

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and the star-crossed pair fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie. As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming-of-age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. But this story offers a glimmer of hope -- a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.

From the author of Cracked and Empty comes a gripping, emotional story of two brothers who must make the ultimate decision about what's more important: family or their differences. It's not Oscar's fault he's misunderstood. Ever since his mother died, he's been disrespected by his father and bullied by his self-absorbed older brother, so he withdraws from his fractured family, seeking refuge in his art. Vance wishes his younger brother would just loosen up and be cool. It was hard enough to deal with their mother's death without Oscar getting all emotional. At least when Vance pushes himself in lacrosse and parties, he feels alive. But when their father's alcoholism sends him into liver failure, the two brothers must come face-to-face with their demons--and each other--if they are going to survive a very uncertain future.

Happily Ever After gets a serious makeover in this swoony, non-stop, thrill-ride of a conclusion to the Trouble Is a Friend of Mine trilogy. Digby and Zoe have been skirting around each other for so long that you might think they'd lose their magic if they ever actually hooked up. But never fear-there's all the acerbic wit, steamy chemistry, and sarcastic banter you could possibly hope for. Now that Digby's back in town he's plunged Zoe (and their Scooby Gang of wealthy frenemy Sloane, nerd-tastic genius Felix, and aw-shucks-handsome Henry) back into the deep end on the hunt for his kidnapped sister. He's got a lead, but it involves breaking into a secret government research facility, paying a drug dealer off with a Bentley, and possibly committing treason. The schemes might be over-the-top but this Breakfast Club cast is irresistibly real as they cope with regular high school stuff from social media shaming to dating your best friend, all with a twist no one will see coming. "I'm in awe of Tromly because of what she has pulled off...this book sings."-Jesse Andrews, author of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Haters on Trouble Is a Friend of Mine