A satirical novel about life in Zimbabwe's second city Bulawayo, with cults and muti murders, and the exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful.

Depicts the lonely world of Bernadette, a woman who has spent the last forty years living alone on the periphery of a remote West Coast First Nations reserve, serving as a nurse for the community. Only weeks from retirement, Bernadette finds herself unsettled, with no immediate family of her own. And then a shocking announcement crackles over the VHF radio of the remote medical outpost: Chase Charlie, the young man that Bernadette loves like a son, is missing.

A college instructor embarks on a fanatical quest to save his job-and enact righteous revenge-in this brilliantly acerbic satire of university politics during the early Cold War years Henry Mulcahy's future is in question. An instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, an institute of higher learning renowned for its progressive approach to education, he has just received word that he will not be teaching next semester. He strongly suspects that his dismissal has been engineered by his nemesis, the college president, who Henry believes resents his superior skills as an educator. Or perhaps he is being targeted by the government in this Cold War era, now that Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt is in full swing, especially since Henry's dedication to independent thinking is, he believes, renowned. Whatever the case, Henry Mulcahy wants justice-and vengeance-and he will not go quietly without a fight. But the battle might expose too much of Henry's true nature... Witty and biting, Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe is a deliciously pointed satire of the world of higher education and its petty despots, tiny wars, and internal politics. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate.

Guinea-Bissau, 2012. Mixing fiction and fact, Sylvain Prudhomme revisits the famous '70s music group Super Mama Djombo, as seen through the eyes of Couto, the laconic guitarist. After learning of the death of the singer, Dulce—once the love of his life&mdashCouto wanders through the capital city, from bar to bar, friend to friend. Thirty years file past in his memories: of the woman he loved, of guerillas fighting against Portuguese colonizers, and of the golden days of a legendary band that played all over the world with a sound that was new, fresh, and driven by the pride of an entire country.Tension mounts page after page as the group prepares a final concert in Dulce's honour, even as a coup d'état is prepared by her husband, Guinea-Bissau's Army Chief of Staff.

The year is 1922, and young Nick Carraway moves to the village of West Egg, where he discovers that his neighbor is the eclectic millionaire Jay Gatsby. As he and Gatsby become acquainted, Nick is thrown into a world full of dazzling parties, unrequited love, and unchecked idealism. Gatsby, surrounded by riches, yearns for the love of a woman who chose another man. He waits for her every night, using a green light at the end of his dock to call out to her from across the water. Daisy, stuck in a loveless marriage, dreams of what could have been-and gets a taste for it after she is re-acquainted with Gatsby through Nick. Considered by critics to be one of the greatest novels ever written, this 1925 masterpiece is a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that's full of literary intrigue, resounding metaphors, and decadent glimpses into the glitz and glam of early twentieth-century America. As relevant today as ever, it offers a cautionary tale of the American Dream, warning against the temptation to believe that enough money paired with equal desire can achieve anything-even reverse the deepest regrets.

Joe is blessed with resolve and with good partners to share the load in his quest for gold. Stinky Riley is a wrangler and bush pilot who is Joe's first mentor in prospecting. Isidore Chartrand is a hunter and trapper who accompanies Joe on his northernmost odyssey, and more than once, saves Joe's life. Joe has to fight to protect his claim, and this conflict sets in motion a moral dilemma that will dog him for the rest of his life.

On the long trail from high adventure and romance to atonement, readers will meet some delightful, complex, and sometimes malicious characters. Carpenter's latest novel is a quest for more than one kind of gold.

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is not content simply to read and discuss books. Their process is a little more involved. They once kidnapped Irving Layton and took him for an excursion up a mountain. They attempted to recreate a scene of a nun swinging from a bridge-builder's broken arm in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. But when they begin to re-enact the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the early days of the Iraq War, the book begins to enact them instead, sending the Cabalists across the globe and driving the narrators out of their own tale. Cross-dressing Aline becomes obsessed with the Baghdad Blogger, Anna with dabbling in prostitution, Missy with the ticking of her biological clock, Romy with Emmy, and the striped (yes, striped!) Emmy with the maker of the fitzbot, an ambulatory artificial-intelligence experiment. In the centre of it all are Runner Coghill and her little brother Neil, who are still mourning their sister and who brought to the group the ten priceless cuneiform Gilgamesh stones. Underlying it all is the tale of telling the tale, the convolutedness and self-consciousness of our delighted narrators, Jennifer and Danielle, as they reconstruct the tangled story - with more than their fair share of asides - to bring us a novel that is cryptographically charming and eruditely engrossing. The Girls Who Saw Everything presents a bizarre book club like no other, and a story so delightfully allusive to literature that it may very well become a book club favourit itself - though only among the slightly strange. 'A sort of Tristram Shandy for the twenty-first century, Sean Dixon's first novel is an intellectual, sexual, logorrheic, bibliophilic, cryptological, political and archeological rant of the first order. It'll change your idea of what "written in stone" means, and it'll blow your mind too.' - Michael Redhill (Consolation, Martin Sloane)

Alexis Spencer thinks she has it all figured out. Even when life gets her down, she's never too far away from another inspirational quote to rationalize her failures and ignore all her problems. Her boyfriend breaks it off, she loses her job, her closest friends are a distant memory, and her college debt is still as high as the day she left. In typical fashion, she blames the world for her problems, including her eighteen-year-old self who should have just tried harder and put their life on a better track. After feeling sorry for herself, she goes on a bender to forget her problems and ends up blacking out. But this time she doesn't wake up at home; she isn't even in the right city; in fact, she isn't even in the right year. She's back in her college town in the year 2002, and she thinks she's been given a second chance to do things over--that is, until she comes face-to-face with her unruly eighteen-year-old self, who goes by the name of Lexi because it's sexier. Right from the get-go, she has to get acclimated to life in the early 2000s again, which has its ups (no Kardashians) and downs (no cell phone). Once she meets Lexi though, the hard part truly begins. First, Alexis must convince her that she is, in fact, from the future. Then she has to convince Lexi to let her live in the dorm with her. Finally, they must learn to get along and come to terms with the fact that, alone, they will never make things right but, together, they could change their life for the better.

Run by Karen Morton, the eccentric, sex-fantasy-prone mother in a hilarious yet deeply troubled dysfunctional family in North Vancouver, the Footstop Cafe is a place to put your feet up near the beautiful but tragedy-plagued Lynn Canyon and its vertigo-inspiring footbridge. The canyon and the cafe serve as the nexus around which Karen's universe revolves. Things happen here. Amazing things. Karen's husband is a podiatrist with a foot fetish, her teenage daughter thinks she's a lesbian but is afraid to confront the reality, and her younger son is given to having bowel movements in closets and building bombs. Throw in Karen's unconventional Anglican minister father and his Tibetan wife, a hairy belly dancer named Moey, a randy virgin high school diver with Olympic ambitions, and a host of other quirky, unforgettable characters and you have a debut novel that is at turns absurdist, touching, manic, and supremely irreverent.