Machine

Celia’s body is not her own, but even her conscious mind can barely tell the difference. Living on the cutting edge of biomechanical science was supposed to allow her to lead a normal life in a near-perfect copy of her physical self while awaiting a cure for a rare and deadly genetic disorder.

But a bioiandroid isn’t a real person. Not according to the protesters outside Celia’s house, her coworkers, or even her wife. Not according to her own evolving view of herself. As she begins to strip away the human affectations and inhibitions programmed into her new body, the chasm between the warm pains of flesh-and-blood life and the chilly comfort of the machine begins to deepen. Love, passion, reality, and memory war within Celia’s body until she must decide whether to betray old friends or new ones in the choice between human and machine.

The Autobiography of Jenny X

On the surface of things Nadia Orsini’s life appears comfortable and unremarkable – Ivy League educated, happily married to a doctor, a mother of three, and a moderately successful photographer. But not all is as it seems. Nadia has been telling lies. Nobody, not even her family, knows about her past, her dark dealings with a U.S. senator, or the scandal she was caught up in surrounding his young son. Then, Nadia receives a disturbing package in the mail and her mask threatens to disintegrate, exposing a horrifying secret. She realizes someone is spying on her, has broken in to her studio and rummaged through her hidden safe. If she can’t stop them, she will lose her husband, family, suburban home – and the precarious hold on her own singular identity. Meanwhile, from a prison cell in the mountains, a convicted felon named Christopher Benedict is hatching a plot. The leader of a shadowy group of Aktionists, he writes daily to a woman known only as “Jenny X.” Lisa Dierbeck’s startling first novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller, gave an unflinching, raw account of a relationship between a charismatic adult man and an underage girl. Set in the gritty art world of the 70s, its surprising humor, honesty and eroticism drew acclaim from numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, O (the Oprah magazine), Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times Book Review, which named it a Notable Book of 2003.

Endogamy Blues

The neo-fascist armies of the Liberator have swept across the Americas like a plague. Montreal is in flames, and the front is less than a kilometre away.

Seventeen year-old Private Joanie Morgernstern can expect no mercy from the victors. As a Canadian soldier, an Augmented Human and a Jew, she is a blood enemy to the Liberator three times over. Aircraftman Michael Cross, 16, a technician in the Air Force of the Iroquois Six Nations, is on the same hitlist. Their fanatically racist enemies will show them no quarter and no mercy.

Swept up in Canada’s last, desperate attempt to stave off defeat, Joanie and Mike expect nothing but death. Instead, they find each other.

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Like Son

Set amidst the outsider worlds of present-day downtown New York, 1990s Los Angeles, and 1940s Mexico City, Like Son is the not-so-simple story of a father, a son, and the love-blindness shared between them.

Meet Frank Cruz: a post-punk, sardonic, thirty-year-old who unwittingly inherits his dead father’s legacy. Born a bouncing baby girl named Francisca to parents tangled in a doomed love affair, Frank grows up in both the poorest barrios and poshest hills of Southern California. A defiant loner, Frank leaves home at the age of eighteen for the big city, but instead is sucked back into helping his estranged and blind father navigate an untimely death. On his deathbed, Frank’s father gives him a mysterious crumbling photograph of a woman with a stunning gaze: Nahui Olin, a fierce member of the early-20th-century Mexican avant-garde who once brought tragedy upon the Cruz family.

Punctured to his core by Nahui, Frank takes her portrait and flees to New York City to start anew–this time for real. There he meets eccentric, gorgeous, and sharp-tongued Nathalie. The two fall in love, but after seven years of happy-go-lucky life together, in September 2001 the New York skyline tumbles, and Frank finds himself smack in the middle of his predestined fate.

The Man Who Folded Himself

The Man Who Folded Himself, written in 1973 (and reissued by BenBella in 2003) is a classic science fiction novel by award-winning author David Gerrold. This work was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards and is considered by some critics to be the finest time travel novel ever written.

Migration Songs

Joan is on the brink. Cough drop addict, school bus driver, mixed race daughter of a Maoist English father and a Chinese-Canadian mother, Joan struggles for meaning after a friend’s death reveals a secret life. Migration Songs is a lost letter from your past, an intimate experience full of humour and grace.

Trash Sex Magic

Jennifer Stevenson’s debut novel starts with Raedawn Somershoe who lives in a trailer on the banks of the Fox River. She likes men and men like her. It runs in the family: her mother, Gelia, can seduce a man just by walking across a road. When they set their sights on a man, something magical happens.

Alexander Caebeau drives a bucketloader for a construction company. He’s lonely, homesick, tired of cutting down trees and putting up ugly buildings. He dreams of going back to the Bahamas, but when Alexander meets Raedawn Somershoe, something magical happens.

Raedawn has just lost her lover. Her mother is keeping secrets from her. Her childhood sweetheart has come home and is looking for answers. Riverfront developers want Rae and her family gone. She may just be falling in love with Alexander Caebeau. And the Fox River is beginning to rise. . . . Something magical is about to happen.