Natalie Joan MacLellan

It’s the summer of 1994, and Danny’s friends have a mission to get him laid before he starts grade twelve in the fall. Danny however, is just not that into girls. Determined to prove once and for all that he is not gay, Danny hopes his new coworker Lisa, visiting for the summer from New York City, […]

Twelve-year-old Moth dreams of riches, mansions and exotic pets, and mostly of leaving behind her dreary life in the slums of New York—but instead is sold into servitude by her mother only to “escape” into a life of prostitution. When inspected for cleanliness and virginity at her new brothel home, Moth first meets Dr. Sadie, […]

Big Town is a story of friendship more than a story of Africville, as its cover suggests. The friendship between the dim-witted Early, sick and troubled Toby and tomboy Chub unfolds with the community and its destruction as a backdrop. Narrated by Early, seventeen but with the mental age of seven or eight, is a […]

Gordon Rankin Jr.—“Rank” to his friends—is a hulking goon; a hockey enforcer; a bouncer, held in awe by all due to his impressive size and presumed criminal tendencies. When Rank discovers one of his oldest and most trusted friends has published a novel turning his most tragic moments into an embarrassing cliche, Rank writes his […]

Within the first 30 pages, McIntosh had led me so seamlessly from the fall of Ninevah in 612 BCE to the sacking of Iraq in 2003 that I hadn’t realized she had changed scenes, and I was hooked. The Witch of Babylon is an antiquities thriller—like the DaVinci Code, but more interesting and without the […]

The debut novel from Canadian author Moira Young turns the young adult dystopian fiction genre on its head with the story of Saba, stubborn, sometimes mean and often naïve, off to rescue her twin brother from the hands of the King. In a post-apocalyptic, barren world, destroyed by the previous “Wreckers” civilization, Saba’s father is […]

When we meet Jake Upshore, the 18-year-old hero of Sheree Fitch’s Pluto’s Ghost, he is bleeding, handcuffed and desperately in love, and can’t quite believe the mess he has gotten into this time. When his girlfriend Skye runs off to Halifax, rumoured to be pregnant, Jake rushes off to find her, determined to do the […]