The Killing Circle
By Andrew Pyper
Doubleday Canada 978 0 385 66369 4
$29.95 Fiction

When Patrick Rush, journalist, single father and failed novelist, decides to join a creative writing circle, it seems a fertile time for the imagination.

In the city of Toronto, a murderer is striking at random, leaving his victims' bodies mutilated and dismembered, and taunting the police with cryptic notes.

Influenced by the atmosphere of menace and fear, the members of the group begin to read each other their own dark, unsettling tales. One, Angela, tells a mesmerizing story about a child-stealer called the Sandman. Patrick, though, finds fantasy and reality becoming blurred. Is the maniac at large in fact the Sandman? What does Angela really know? And is he himself being stalked by a killer?

At once a complex and compulsive read, The Killing Circle explores the side effects of an increasingly fame-mad culture, where even the staid realm of literature can fall prey to ravenous ambition.

Cockroach
By Rawi Hage
House of Anansi 088784 209 7
$29.95 Fiction

Dublin Impact Award-winning author Rawi Hage latest novel, Cockroach, takes place during a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-confessed "thief" has just tried and failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend therapy sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a story to tell, and out into the frozen streets of the city after dark, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privilegded, but willfully blind, citizens around him.

Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humour.

Please join us to hear Mr Hage read from this exciting new novel. See events page for details.

Ragged Company
By Richard Wagamese
Doubleday Canada 978 0 385 66156 0
$29.95 Fiction

In Richard Wagamese's new novel a cast of characters- the "ragged company"- comes together in a most unexpected way and soon find their lives changed forever.

Four chronically homeless people- Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick, and Digger- seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing "the same story over and over again" in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck.

A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack of a fixed address. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, are entirely transformed.

Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past, as Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of "home", as he reconnects them to their histories.

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
By Daniel J. Levitin
Viking Canada 978 0 670 06788 6
$32.00 Science

Preserving the emotional heritage of our lives and of our species, music, from its very beginning, was allied in dance, as the structure of the brain confirms. Developing that neurological observation, Levitin shows how music and dance enabled the bonding and friendship necessary for society, science, and art to evolove. Songs of Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge, Religion and Love have been sung for tens of thousands of years. This palette of song types constitutes a remarkable tool for understanding who we are. It can reveal what music is accomplishing at work, at play, in the throes of romantic breakup, or on the crest of a brilliant revelation.

Blending cutting-edge scientific findings with his own sometimes hilarious experiences as a musician and music-industry professional, Levitin's sweeping study also incorporates wisdom gleaned from interviews with music icons, conductors, historians, anthroplogists and evolutionary biologists. The result is an inspired tour of prehistoric yet elegant systems at play when we sing and dance at a wedding or cheer at a concert- or tune out quietly with an iPod. These six songs enlighten human nature in a way you will never forget.

Child 44: A Novel
By Tom Robb Smith
Grand Central 0 446 40238 9
$27.99 Fiction

Stalin's Soviet Union strives to be a paradise for its workers, providing for all their needs. One of its fundamental pillars is that its citizens live free from the fear of ordinary crime and criminals.

But in this society, millions do live in fear...of the State. Death is a whisper away. The mere suspicion of ideolgical disloyalty-owning a book from the decadent West, the wrong word at the wrong time- sends millions of innocents into the Gulags or to their executions. Defending the system from its citizens is the MGB, the State Security Force. And no MGB officer is more courageous, conscientious, or idealistic than Leo Demidov.

A war hero with a beautiful wife, Leo lives in relative luxury in Moscow, even providing a decent apartment for his parents. His only ambition has been to serve his country. For this greater good, he has arrested and interrogated.

Then the impossible happens. A different kind of criminal- a murderer- is on the loose, killing at will. At the same time, Leo finds himself demoted and denounced by his enemies, his world turned upside down, and every belief he's ever had shattered. The only way to save his life and the lives of his family is to uncover the criminal. But in a society that is officially paradise, its a crime against the State to suggest that a murdered- much less a serial killer- is in their midst.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the 20th Century
By Edward Dolnick
HarperCollins 978 0 06 082541 6
$28.95 Art/History

As riveting as a World War Two thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skills. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes higher, and the villians are scarier.

Revenant: A Novel
By Tristan Hughes
Douglas & MacIntyre 978 1 55365 349 3
$29.95 Fiction

In a remote Welsh village by the sea, four friends grow up together. Plain but charismatic Del is the ringleader, unstoppable, supremely confident. Neil, shy and stuttering, and Ricky, full of rage and loneliness, are misfits until Del takes them under her wing. Steph is the outsider, but she, too is mesmerized by Del. Together they muck about in the woods, search for treasure on the seashore, do dares, share cigarettes. Then, one terrible day, the gang is broken up for good.

Ten years later, Neil, Ricky and Steph revisit their childhood haunts and relive the memories that have cast a shadow over their lives. Del is the beating heart at the centre of their stories and, at the same time, a gaping absence.

Revenant is a tour de force of sustained storytelling. In his Canadian debut, Tristan Hughes stitches together memories of childhood and uncovers the secrets and betrayals of friendship with thoughtful, shocking brilliance.

The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World
By E. L. Konigsburg
Atheneum 1 4169 4972 0
$21.00 (Ages 10-14)

Amedeo Kaplan seems just like any other new kid who has moved into the town of St. Malo, Florida, a navy town where new faces are the norm. But Amedeo has a secret, a dream: More than anything in the world, he wants to discover something- a place, a process, even a fossil- some treasure that no one realizes is there until he finds it. And he would also like to discover a true friend to share these things with.

William Wilcox seems like an unlikely candidate for friendship: an aloof boy who is all edges and who owns silence the way other people own words. When Amedeo and William find themselves working together on a house sale for Amedeo's eccentric neighbour, Mrs Zender, Amedeo has an inkling that both his wishes may come true.

Two-time Newberry winner E.L. Konigsburg spins a magnificent tale of art, discovery, friendship, history and truth.

A Literary Life
By Morley Callaghan
Exile Editions 978 1 55096 099 0
$34.95 Literature

Morley Callaghan, born in 1903, was not just a prolific writer of fiction (he published sixteen novels, a memoir, and four volumes of short stories), but all his life he wrote essays about other writers- starting in the Twenties with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and James Joyce. Then in a kind of "table talk" he commented through the years, in magazines, newspapers, CBC Radio and TV, on everything from Naziism, to D.H. Lawrence and censorship, to Jewish writing in America. In his final decades, he wrote meditations on Solzhenitsyn and Marquez, Our Winter and On Failure, and on the invasion of our privacy by the police, always dealing with complex matters in his graceful, conversational prose. Here, brought together for the first time, is a selection of these masterful reflections on writing, and the writer's life.

The Assassin's Song
By M. G. Vassanji
Anchor Canada 978 0 385 66352 6
$22.00 Fiction

In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002, Karsan Dargawalla, heir to Pirbaag- the shrine of a mysterious medieval Sufi- begins to tell the story of his family. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the shrine, but he longs to be "just ordinary". Despite his father's pleas, Karsan leaves home for Harvard, and, eventually, marriage and a career. Not until tragedy strikes, both in Karsan's adopted home and in Pirbaag, is he drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover, what, if anything, is left for him in India.

A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning- The Assassin's Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.