A novel that explores the challenge and necessity of loving difficult people. Angela Morrison has it all. She's married to a wealthy man, adores her son, grows orchids, and volunteers at Our Daily Bread Food Pantry. What more could she want? More &$8212; much more. And she's willing to risk everything after meeting Carsten, the landscaper with the glacier-blue eyes. Sister Eileen, who runs Our Daily Bread Food Pantry, struggles with the silence of God and harbours a secret she believes is unforgivable. She yearns to convince Angela she is loved by God, despite her selfishness and destructive behaviour, but in order for that to be authentic Eileen must learn to love her first, and that's no easy task — especially after Angela causes a terrible tragedy. Through the crucible of their relationship, Angela and Eileen discover how caring for the most difficult among us and practising forgiveness, no matter how painful, opens a door to the miracle of transformation.

The downtown core of Toronto is being consumed by elysium, a drug that allows its users to slip through the permeable edges of this world into the next before consuming them utterly. Peddled by the icy Srebrenka, few have managed to escape the drug and its dealer. But Maggie has.



Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," and woven through with northern folk tales, The Grimoire of Kensington Market is the story of Maggie, proprietor of the Grimoire bookstore, the cosmic nexus of all the world's tales. Years after beating her addiction, Maggie is dismayed by the reappearance of Srebrenka in her life. Although she resists temptation, she quickly learns that her brother, Kyle, has been ensnared by Srebrenka's drug-laced beguiling.



Driven by guilt and love, Maggie sets off on a quest to rescue Kyle from the Silver World, where robbers stalk the woods, where tavern keepers weave clouds to hide mountains and where caribou race along the northern lights. There, she must discover what hidden strengths still lie within her.

From the author of the acclaimed Our Daily Bread and The Empty Room comes a rich and fascinating new novel of mysterious, magic-riddled 7th-century England: Against A Darkening Sky transports the reader to a rich yet violent past where a young woman is torn between her deepest beliefs and her desire to belong in a changing world. Wilona, the lone survivor of a plague that has wiped out her people, makes her way across the moors to a new life in the village of Ad Gefrin, where she is apprenticed to Touilt, a revered healer and seeress. She blossoms under Touilt's tutelage and will one day take her place, but as an outsider, she is viewed with suspicion by all except Margawn, a warrior in the lord's hall. When the king proclaims a conversion to the new Christian religion, Ad Gefrin becomes a dangerous place for Wilona and Touilt. Their very lives are at risk as the villagers embrace the new faith and turn against the old ways, even as Wilona's relationship...

"Backwoods Noir" at its best. For generations the Erskine clan has lived in poverty and isolation on North Mountain, shunned by the God-fearing people of nearby Gideon. Now, Albert Erskine comes down off the mountain hoping to change the future for his brothers and sisters and sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything. Inspired by a true story. From best-selling novelist Lauren B. Davis comes the deeply compassionate story of what happens when we view our neighbors as "The Other," as well as the transcendent power of unlikely friendships. OUR DAILY BREAD is a compelling narrative set in a closely observed, sometimes dark, but ultimately life-enhancing landscape. Lauren B Davis' vivid prose and empatheticaly developed characters will remain in the reader's mind long after the final chapter has been read." -- Jane Urquhart, prize winning author of AWAY and THE STONE CARVERS."I'll never forget this book, the sunning power of the descriptions, the attention to detail, the riveting plot, the fully-realized characters--this is storytelling at its very best." -- Duff Brenna, author of THE BOOK OF MAMIE, THE HOLY BOOK OF THE BEARD, TOO COOL"From the first chapter of OUR DAILY BREAD...I was hooked--by the characters, by the flow, by the clean, rhythmic prose." -- Thomas E. Kennedy, author of THE COPENHAGEN QUARTET"Rendered with gorgeous prose, this compact, fast-moving novel features an astonishing range of tones, from hope to heartbreak, from black humor to white-knuckle terror." -- Dexter Palmer, author of THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTIONReview" Powerful, harrowing, and deeply unsettling.  It keeps you reading as your blood pressure mounts...proceeds like a noose gradually tightening...stark, beautiful, sad and frankly terrifying*...finely crafted, with careful attention to characterization, style, and pacing.  It succeeds on every level."--(Starred Review) The Quill & Quire"Absorbing, strikingly-written, and subtly-honed . . . a page-turner!" --  Gordon Hauptfleisch, blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-our-daily-bread-a/"full of remarkable moments. . . a level of detail that puts us in the beating hearts of imperiled souls. . . . simple, brave, powerful scenes, skillfully written with an anger no less effective for being tempered - scenes that sit with the soul long after the book is closed." -  Alan Cuymn, THE GLOBE & MAILLonglisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Named as one of the "Very Best Books of 2011" by THE GLOBE & MAIL and the BOSTON GLOBE."Thrilling . . unflinching . . unforgettable. Davis makes us care about her characters . . imaginatively transformed by exquisite prose.  Her moral fiction calls us to empathize, read, imagine and hear. This is a story of getting lost in the woods, of meeting the monster and getting out alive." Jean Randich, Truthdig.com **From the AuthorOne of the things I've been troubled by in the past few years is the increasing polarization I see around me.  It pops up in any number of places - religion, politics both local and international, public rhetoric, the media, etc.  We don't have to look far for examples - perhaps no farther than our prisons, or the town next door, or even in our own families.I write to figure out what I think about things and to attempt to find meaning.  I try to find metaphors in which to explore my feelings and thoughts on what obsesses me.As I pondered my concerns about the ever-widening gaps I noticed around me, a story from my past kept rising to the surface.  I lived in Nova Scotia for a brief time in 1972-1973.  While there, I heard stories about a community up on a nearby mountain.  They were terrible stories, involving incest, aborted and deformed babies, prostitution, bootlegging and so forth.  I told myself these dreadful tales couldn't be true. I believed, naively, that if they were true, surely someone would have done something about it. Then, in the early 1980s one of the children of the Goler clan told her story of generational abuse to a teacher.  This teacher came from another province and hadn't been in Nova Scotia very long.  She in turn called an RCMP officer, who also hadn't been in the community for very long. They insisted an investigation begin and eventually many of the clan adults were in jail and the children in foster care. I was horrified, but also mystified.  If all those rumors were true, why had it taken so long for someone to intervene? Well, the answer seemed to be that the people who lived on the mountain had, for generations, been considered "Those People" as in "What do you expect from those people?"  The people who lived in the prosperous Annapolis Valley nearby, in communities founded hundreds of years earlier on Puritanical religious principles, believed their neighbors were so "Other" as to be beyond the pale.The extreme marginalization of the community and the terrible repercussions of ostracism haunted me and it seemed the perfect framework to explore how such ordinary people could do such dreadful things, or permit such dreadful things to continue. I have had several instances in my own life of feeling like the "Other."  Although I explore the theme more personally in my previous novel, THE STUBBORN SEASON, in which a young girl battles the tyranny of living with a mentally ill mother during the Great Depression, in OUR DAILY BREAD the character of Ivy Evans is based on some of my own experiences with marginalization.  My family, afflicted by mental illness and alcoholism, was going through a rough time the summer I was nine.  I was an only child, and adopted, and rather bookish and prone to making up stories, all of which helped to make me 'Other' in the eyes of some of the children in the neighborhood.  That summer, a lady who owned a little antique shop near my house let me hang around the store.  I'm sure she never knew just how much that meant to me, but it was a refuge from loneliness and bullying and I've never forgotten it.*

Where does one person end and the other begin? That's the question that haunts Irene, a girl growing up in Toronto during the Great Depression. Living with her father, a pharmacist who finds comfort in the bottle, and her mother, a woman teetering on the edge of her own depression, Irene's crumbling family situation mirrors the economic and social turmoil just beyond the front door of their respectable, working class neighborhood. As she grows into a young woman, Irene finds herself consumed by her mother's increasingly erratic moods and isolated from a world where unemployment, poverty and bigotry have taken firm root in the water-starved soil of town and country. Yet in the midst of lives that seem lost, Irene finds strength in the unlikely form of David, a young man from the Jewish farming community of Sonnerfeld, Alberta, who is fighting his own battle for dignity, hope and a place in the world. The Stubborn Season is an utterly compelling first novel, peopled with...

Colleen Kerrigan wakes up sick and bruised, with no clear memory of the night before. It’s Monday morning, and she is late for work again. She’s shocked to see the near-empty vodka bottle on her kitchen counter. It was full at noon yesterday; surely she didn’t drink that much last night? As she struggles out the door, she fights the urge to have a sip, just to take the edge off. But no, she’s not going to drink today.But this is the day Colleen’s demons come for her. A very bad day spirals into night as a series of flashbacks take the reader through Colleen’s past—moments of friendship and loss, fragments of peace and possibility. The single constant is the bottle, always close by, Colleen’s worst enemy and her only friend.In this unforgettable work, acclaimed novelist Lauren B. Davis has created as searing, raw and powerful a portrayal of the chaos and pain of alcoholism as we have encountered in fiction. Told with compassion, insight and an irresistible gallows humour, The Empty Room takes us to the depths of addiction, only to find a revelation at its heart: the importance and grace of one person reaching out to another.Praise for The Empty Room“Unflinching and unsentimental, The Empty Room charts a day from hell in the life of Colleen Kerrigan, alone, nearly 50, and spiralling into yet another alcoholic binge. It is a credit to the brilliance and humanity of novelist Lauren B. Davis that, even in this nightmare, we find utter truth, wicked humour and just enough hope to keep on reading.” —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes“This is a raw, exciting book—alcoholism from deep inside the jaws of death and denial. To call it ‘honest’ is a disservice: it is scalding.” —Bharati Mukherjee, author of Desirable Daughters and Miss New India“In The Empty Room, Lauren B. Davis has given us an honest, brave account of self-destruction, one that harrowingly reminds us that recovery from the abyss of alcoholism is never easy, but eloquently hints at what is possible when the self-deception and denial end.” —Linden McIntyre, author of The Bishop's Man and Why Men Lie“Soaked in alcoholism and addiction, this story plumbs the bottomless human genius for self-deception and our singular talent for wandering into hellholes of our own design. Lauren B. Davis writes deftly, never averting her gaze—and never letting go of the fact that threads of grace lie always within our grasp.” —Alan Cumyn, author of The Famished Lover and The Sojourn“The Empty Room is a rare act of courage—every page a brilliant, defiant examination of desire, loss, sorrow, triumph and grace. My heart will not soon forget this book.” —Ami McKay, author of The Birth House and The Virgin Cure

Scarred by his experiences as a war correspondent, Matthew flees to Paris to heal and forget—even as he must stir up the past to write the memoir he's promised to his impatient literary agent. Resurrecting a friendship with Jack, a Vietnam vet and ex-mercenary, Matthew enters Jack's alcohol-dimmed world of shadowy bars and calculating lovers. But there is also Saida—beautiful, damaged and proud—who fled Lebanon with her family and now runs a café. Matthew is drawn to her kindness, and to her fierce love for her teenage son, who is growing into manhood on the treacherous streets of the North African quarter. This is Paris far from the glimmer of tourist lights. Here secrets are divulged, guilt and passion revealed, and Matthew is caught up in an inescapable final confrontation. The Radiant City is a novel of astonishing depth and power.