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Psychological fiction

  • Author:
    Tartt, Donna
    Summary:

    The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. In this brilliant debut novel, Donna Tartt gives us a richly textured and hypnotic story of golden youth corrupted by its own moral arrogance. Richard Papen had never been to New England before his nineteenth year. Then he arrived at Hampeden College and quickly became seduced by the sweet, dark rhythms of campus life, in particular by an elite group of five students, Greek scholars, worldly, self-assured, and at first glance, highly unapproachable. Yet as Richard was accepted and drawn into their inner circle, he learned a terrifying secret that bound them to one another, a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brough to brutal life and lead to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning.

  • Author:
    Boll, Rosemarie
    Summary:

    Danny McMillan never knew that his father was abusing his mother, until a night of violence that shattered his family forever. Watching in the courtroom as his father is sentenced, Danny struggles with divided loyalties – to his mother on one side and to his father whom he wants to forgive on the other. After one trial is over, another begins for Danny. Social services and the police convince Danny’s mother that they must go into a victim protection program. Danny is asked to leave everything behind – his home, his friends, and the love and support of his grandparents. In a new city and attending a new school, Danny is even given a new name – David Mayer. But who is David? He is someone that Danny does not want to be, living a life he cannot accept. As David, he is pushing boundaries he never would have pushed.

  • Author:
    Baille, Martha
    Summary:

    From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated novel The Incident Report comes a hypnotic novel following Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal, full of strange encounters, inexplicable visions, and the shifting of time. After returning back to civilization, Heinrich discovers inexplicably that many years have passed. Narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich's life, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel dances between reality and fantasy. Set in today's disappearing North and brimming with imagination and creativity, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings. Bespeak Audio Editions brings Canadian voices to the world with audiobook editions of some of the country's greatest works of literature, performed by Canadian actors.

  • Author:
    Goodman, Carol
    Summary:

    Tess has worked hard to keep her past buried, where it belongs. Then one more morning, Tess gets a call from the headmistress of her son, Rudy's, school: Lila Zeller, her son's girlfriend, has been found dead on the beach, not far from where Tess found Rudy just hours before. As the investigation escalates, Tess learns that this isn't the first blemish on the school's record, and realizes that not all skeletons will stay safely locked in the closet.

  • Author:
    Banville, John
    Summary:

    When Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Mr and Mrs Grace and their twin children Myles and Chloe appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Max grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years, shaping everything that was to follow.

  • Author:
    Ravel, Edeet
    Summary:

    Seventeen-year-old Fern has not had many breaks in life. She struggles at school and lives with her mother in a roach-infested apartment. Then, suddenly, her mother has a heart attack and dies, and Fern is devastated. But she's a survivor, and she's not afraid of hard work. Sidestepping social services, she quits school and sets out to look after herself. With a little luck and ingenuity and a lot of determination, she manages to live rent-free by becoming a janitor in a crummy apartment building. When she runs out of toothpaste she gets freebies from dentists' offices. Then she tries to juggle two other shift jobs, including one in a restaurant kitchen, so she has access to leftover food. But despite her resourcefulness and resolve, the exhaustion and stress eventually take their toll, until Fern discovers that she is not really on her own after all.

  • Author:
    McGrath, Wendy
    Summary:

    Wendy McGrath's The Santa Rosa Trilogy, a decade in the making, is finally available in a complete collection. Join a young Canadian girl in mid-century Edmonton, Alberta, as she seeks answers to life's questions and finds beauty in the mundane. Santa Rosa: What is real when seen through the eyes of a child? When does the harshness of reality transform idyllic memories? The young narrator of Wendy McGrath's new book seeks the answers to these questions as she tries to make sense of the disintegration of her parents' marriage-a process echoed by the slow disintegration of their neighbourhood. North East: A working-class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents' farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew. Broke City: Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.

  • Author:
    Martinusen-Coloma, Cindy
    Summary:

    Claire O'Rourke is a young writer visiting per parents in her small hometown. Her life soon becomes connected to that of the reclusive Sophia Fleming, an older woman who has lived in isolation for many years. When Sophia finds a long-lost journal belonging to a woman nameed Josephine Vanderrook, she reaches out to Claire to share her discovery.

  • Author:
    Bush, Catherine
    Summary:

    Despite her hatred of physical violence, Arcadia Hearne is a researcher who studies contemporary war. Specializing in issues of risk and military intervention, she methodically surveys the rich arsenal of current global conflicts available to her dispassionate intellect. Ironically, she can’t seem to come to terms with her own inner conflicts, desperately trying to balance the scales of emotional risk and emotional pain.

    Arcadia is haunted by a violent episode in her past, an incident involving two university students, both her lovers, who resort to an old-fashioned pistol duel in a Toronto ravine to decide who will win her love. Hidden in the trees, Arcadia can’t bring herself to intervene. Guilt-ridden and confused, she flees to London, England, as she says, looking for protection from violence through knowledge, through explanations, but not through love. Only when she meets Amir, her new lover, whom she discovers to be an (idealistic) passport forger, does she begin her reconciliation with her past.

  • Author:
    Leroy, Margaret
    Summary:

    Middle-aged mother of two Ginnie Holmes embarks on an affair with a married man, taking to an abandoned river house for their Thursday trysts. But when she thinks she sees a murderer by the river, she must decide whether to risk exposing her affair by going to the police.

  • Author:
    Quinn, Spencer
    Summary:

    In this riveting new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of the Chet and Bernie mystery series, a deeply damaged female soldier home from the war in Afghanistan becomes obsessed with finding a missing girl, gains an unlikely ally in a stray dog, and encounters new perils beyond the combat zone. LeAnne Hogan went to Afghanistan as a rising star in the military, and came back a much lesser person, mentally and physically. Now missing an eye and with half her face badly scarred, she can barely remember the disastrous desert operation that almost killed her. She is confused, angry, and suspects the fault is hers, even though nobody will come out and say it. Shattered by one last blow-the sudden death of her hospital roommate, Marci-LeAnne finds herself on a fateful drive across the country, reflecting on her past and seeing no future. Her native land is now unfamiliar, recast in shadow by her one good eye, her damaged psyche, her weakened body. Arriving in the rain-soaked small town in Washington State that Marci had called home, she makes a troubling discovery: Marci's eight-year-old daughter has vanished. When a stray dog-a powerful, dark, unreadable creature, no one's idea of a pet-seems to adopt LeAnne, a surprising connection is formed and something shifts inside her. As she becomes obsessed with finding Marci's daughter, LeAnne and her inscrutable canine companion are drawn into danger as dark and menacing as her last Afghan mission. This time she has a strange but loyal fellow traveler protecting her blind side. Enthralling, suspenseful, and psychologically nuanced, The Right Side introduces one of the most unforgettable protagonists in modern fiction: isolated, broken, disillusioned-yet still seeking redemption and purpose-LeAnne takes hold of the reader and never lets go.

  • Author:
    WINTON, Tim
    Summary:

    Fred Scully can't wait to see his wife and daughter. He's got them all worked out. He's sweated on this reunion. The doors hiss open. Scully's life falls apart.

  • Author:
    Kane, Darby
    Summary:

    Elisa Wright is convinced her brother-in-law is a murderer. Every woman Josh dates has wound up missing or dead. But when she talks with Josh's new girlfriend, she starts to question her own sanity.

  • Author:
    Crane, Stephen
    Summary:

    During the Civil War, a Union Army soldier flees the battlefield in terror and then must contend with his own internal shame.  A gripping exploration of heroism, cowardice, and one boy’s maturation, this novel is most remarkable for what Crane called his "psychological portrayal of fear."

  • Author:
    Davies, Robertson
    Summary:

    A goodhearted priest and scholar, a professor with a passion for the darker side of medieval psychology, a defrocked monk, and a rich young businessman are all helplessly beguiled by the same coed.

  • Author:
    Jensen, Liz
    Summary:

    After recuperating from a horrendous car accident, Gabrielle Fox longs to rebuild her life and begins a new job at a psychiatric hospital for violent children. But when she meets a patient named Bethany, Gabrielle is intrigued by her visions of natural disasters. Hoping to avert future catastrophes, Gabrielle enlists the help of a physicist to validate Bethany's predictions.

  • Author:
    STEEL, Danielle
    Summary:

    Three women who were inseparable during their college years meet again after 20 years at a ranch in Wyoming to find courage, healing and truth as they reach out to one another and rekindle old relationships.

  • Author:
    Brown, Larry
    Summary:

    Down in Memphis and northern Mississippi, some wildly diverse people are looking for love--but not necessarily in all the right places. Sex-starved alcoholics, college professors, hookers, cops, sailors, runaways, gangsters, and some fairly eccentric canines colide during one whirlwind winter in Dixie.

  • Author:
    Du Bois, W. E. B.
    Summary:

    Cotton, the Silver Fleece, could be the answer to Zora and Bles' prayers for overcoming poverty. While attending school in Rural Alabama, they lovingly nurture their crop. but the white aristocracy is determined to control the price of cotton and monopolize the market. Can these two lovers prevail despite the daunting obstacles before them?

  • Author:
    Mascarenhas, Kate
    Summary:

    In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world's first time machine. But just as they are about to debut their creation, one of them suffers a breakdown, putting the whole project-and future of time travel-in jeopardy. To protect their invention, one member is exiled from the team-erasing her contributions from history. Fifty years later, time travel is a big business. Twenty-something Ruby Rebello knows her beloved grandmother Granny Bee was one of the pioneers, though no one will tell her more. But when Bee receives a mysterious newspaper clipping from the future reporting the murder of an unidentified woman, Ruby becomes obsessed: could it be Bee? Who would want her dead? And most importantly of all: can her murder be stopped? Traversing the decades and told from alternating perspectives, The Psychology of Time Travel introduces a fabulous new voice in fiction and a new must-listen for fans of speculative fiction and women's fiction alike.

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