Toronto Book Award Winner Cordelia Strube is back with another caustic, subversive, and darkly humorous book Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy's, a small chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate's "restructuring" to save her kitchen, while trying to learn to forgive herself and maybe allow some love back into her life. Stevie's biting, hilarious take on her own and others' foibles will make you cheer and will have you loving Misconduct of the Heart (in the immortal words of Stevie's best line cook) "like never tomorrow."

From the acclaimed author of Lemon comes a clever and heartbreaking new novel of love and revelationHarriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.Determined, resourceful, and a little reckless, Harriet tries to navigate the clueless adults around her, dumpster dives for the flotsam and jetsam that fuels her art, and attempts to fathom her complicated feelings for Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus. On the other hand, Irwin's love for Harriet is not conflicted at all. She's his compass. But Irwin himself must untangle the web of the human heart.Masterful and piercingly funny, Strube...

Things aren't going Milo's way. His acting career is floundering, he got dumped, his miserable father vanished, and people keep moving into his house. He finally decides to take action — to help the only person he really likes, the autistic boy next door who's being bullied. But, well, that doesn't really go his way either.

Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she's never met, her adopted father's suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn't left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protégé, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poetFiguring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can't be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise.But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn't mean that these things don't find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.'Bitingly funny ... In introducing readers to the indomitable Lemon, Strube has taken us on a remarkable trip — part literary kaleidoscope, part emotional roller coaster -- into the life and mind of a young girl searching for a love she can't quite bring herself to believe in.' – The National Post'[Cordelia Strube is] Canada's best bet to succeed Alice Munro.' – The Toronto Star'The sleeper Can-Lit hit.' – Chatelaine