The 2012 One Book Toronto title Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls. Alex was witness to this first episode. He's a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex's sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend - the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body's chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever. Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. 'The depth of her understanding ... fills this book with moving scenes and striking perceptions.' --The Globe and Mail (about Between Mountains) 'With pitch-perfect prose, Helwig shows huge compassion and an ability to make Toronto come alive.' --NOW 'stellar ... meticulous and poignant realism' --Montreal Gazette

In Play=Learning, top experts in child development and learning contend that in over-emphasizing academic achievement, our culture has forgotten about the importance of play for children's development.

The day Frances Fall steals a baby from outside a shop is the day her past catches up with her. As Frances tries to explain her terrible actions, she is forced to relive a life that has never made sense to her: a life dominated on one side by a stern unyielding mother and on the other by friendship with the most dazzling daring girl in their no-hope town, a friendship that means the world to a shy insecure teenager but which ends in disaster. Early memories of a better time - of being loved by her parents and doted on by the dazzling aunt who died young, taking all the joy out of their lives - puzzle Frances. In order to fit all the pieces of her past together she must force herself to confront and forgive betrayals that were not of her making. Most of all though, she must forgive herself.

Modernist texts and writings of protest have until now received most of the critical attention of literary scholars of the First World War. Popular literature with its penchant for predictable storylines, melodramatic prose, and patriotic rhetoric has been much-maligned or at the very least ignored. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War redresses the balance. It turns the spotlight on the novels and memoirs of women writers - many of whom are now virtually forgotten - that appealed to a British reading public hungry for amusement, news, and above all, encouragement in the face of uncertainty and grief. The writers of 1914-18 had powerful models for interpreting their war, as a consideration of texts from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 shows. They were also bolstered by wartime publishing practices that reinforced the sense that their books, whether fiction or non-fiction, were not simply 'light' entertainment but a powerful agents of propaganda. Generously illustrated, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print is a scholarly yet accessible illumination of a hitherto untapped resource of women's writing and is an important new contribution to the study of the literature of the Great War.