Into the Heart of the Country
Pauline Holdstock

Set in eighteenth-century Churchill, this compelling new novel takes the reader deep into unexplored territory. Appearing only fleetingly in the historical record of the Hudson's Bay Company are the Native women who lived at the company's Prince of Wales Fort and served as "country wives" to the European traders and whose survival was bound, for better or worse, to the fortunes of those men.

In this story, mixed-blood woman Mary Norton, tells of her liaison with explorer Samuel Hearne, and how, when their small society is torn apart by a French attack on the fort, Mary and the other women find themselves and their children abandoned by their British masters.

Unflinching, powerful and rich in moral ambiguity, this haunting novel explores a tragic meeting of cultures that still reverberates in the present day.

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Bride of New France
Suzanne Desrochers

Laure Beausejour has grown up in a dormitory in Paris surrounded by prostitutes, the insane, and other forgotten women. She dreams with her best friend, Madeleine, of using her needlework skills to become a seamstress and one day marry a nobleman. But in 1669, Laure is sent across the Atlantic to New France with Madeleine as filles du roi. The girls know little of the place they are being sent to, except for stories of ferocious winters and Indians who eat the hearts of French priests. To be banished to Canada is a punishment worse than death.

Bride of New France explores the challenges Laure faces coming into womanhood in a brutal time and place. From the moment she arrives in Ville-Marie (Montreal) she is expected to marry and produce children with a brutish French soldier who himself can barely survive the harsh conditions of his forest cabin. But through her clandestine relationship with Deskaheh, an allied Iroquois, Laure finds a sense of the possibilities in this New World.

What happens to a woman who attempts to make her own life choices in such authoritative times?

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Laurier in Love:
A Novel
Roy MacSkimming

A deeply absorbing novel of passion and politics, Laurier in Love reveals a side of Sir Wilfrid Laurier as Canadians have never known him: romantic and idealistic, inspiring and seductive, yet conflicted and compromised, as he balances his time between his wife and his mistress.

Through the eyes of two fascinating women, we see Laurier the orator, charming Americans in Chicago; Laurier the statesman, starring at Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee celebrations in London; Laurier the conciliator, walking the perilous line between demands of English and French as Canada fights her first foreign war in distant South Africa. The cast of characters includes the aging monarch, the doomed President McKinley, a young Winston Churchill, an even younger Mackenzie King.

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Solemn Vows:
A Marc Edwards Mystery
Don Gutteridge

It's a steamy June in Toronto, 1836. A prominent politician has been assassinated, and in their haste to catch the killer, Lieutenant Marc Edwards and his troops are responsible for the death of an innocent local man. Making matters even worse, Marc may have accidentally gotten himself engaged to the wrong woman, while the right woman still won't answer his letters.

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For a Modest Fee
Freda Jackson

It is 1907, and the Canadian Pacific Railway is driving the engine of the west. Against the fluid backdrop of the Canadian prairies, For a Modest Fee is a story about the women of the era and the expectations that made them the primary caretakers of not only their own families, but of the entire town. A hundred years ago, choices for women were few; married or single, they all stepped into the roles thrust upon them.

For a Modest Fee is a fascinating novel that looks at the evolution, in a few short years, of a prairie town from windblown wilderness to a fitting place for flowerboxes and school recitals.

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