Come Thou Tortoise

A delightfully offbeat story that features an opinionated tortoise and her owner who find themselves in the middle of a life-changing mystery. Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s something, well, odd about her. And we soon know that Audrey’s quest to discover who her father really was – and reunite with Winnifred – will be an adventure like no other. Excerpt: Winnifred is old. She might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff, was embarking on a rock-climbing adventure that would not have been much fun for Winnifred. Back then her name was Iris. Cliff had inherited Iris from the previous tenant. Nobody knew how old Iris was or where she had come from originally. Now Cliff was moving out. He said, Would you like a tortoise. I would not say no to a tortoise, I said. I was alone in Portland and the trees were giant. I picked her up and she blinked at me with her upside-down eyelids. I felt instantly calm. Her eyes were soft brown. Her skin felt like an old elbow. I will build you a castle, I whispered. With a pool. And I was true to my word.

Jessica Grant flies under the radar of realism to find targets worth writing about. These stories are profound, magical and true to life. Nothing seems impossible. It's good to be reminded of that.

David Adams Richards finds universal truths in the very particular setting of New Brunswick’s Miramichi Valley. This, his first novel, provides a window upon a world that is as unsettling, as uncontrollable, and as inescapably authentic as a sudden brawl. The frustrations of the community are brought into focus in the plights of 20-year-old Kevin Dulse, his family, and especially his wild young friends. An intensely realistic story, it stands firm upon its engaging, unaffected characters and the raw talent of its then 22-year-old author.

A heart-swelling debut for fans of The Silver Linings Playbook and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Sometimes life isn’t as simple as heroes and villains. For Zelda, a twenty-one-year-old Viking enthusiast who lives with her older brother, Gert, life is best lived with some basic rules: 1. A smile means “thank you for doing something small that I liked.” 2. Fist bumps and dabs = respect. 3. Strange people are not appreciated in her home. 4. Tomatoes must go in the middle of the sandwich and not get the bread wet. 5. Sometimes the most important things don’t fit on lists. But when Zelda finds out that Gert has resorted to some questionable—and dangerous—methods to make enough money to keep them afloat, Zelda decides to launch her own quest. Her mission: to be legendary. It isn’t long before Zelda finds herself in a battle that tests the reach of her heroism, her love for her brother, and the depth of her Viking strength. When We Were Vikings is an uplifting debut about an unlikely heroine whose journey will leave you wanting to embark on a quest of your own, because after all... We are all legends of our own making.

Walt and Judy are deeply in love, but Judy longs for a child. Walt measures all beauty against that of Judy and doesn’t want her eyes to get any sadder. They stay side by side and search for distractions, realizing they may never have a family—when Walt finds an unexpected opportunity in the pages of Life magazine. Soon they are welcoming Looee, born in Sierra Leone, into their home in the hills of Vermont, where they come to regard him as their son. The three of them eventually find their rhythm and settle into their own version of love and life between four walls. Until the night their unique family is changed forever. Hundreds of miles away, at the Girdish Institute in Florida, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. There is proof that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends. They are political, altruistic; they get angry and forgive. Among them is Mr. Ghoul, who has grown up in a world of rivals, sex, and unpredictable loss. As Looee and Mr. Ghoul’s distant but parallel paths through childhood, adolescence, and early middle age converge, a new experience of family is formed. Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, A Beautiful Truth is an inventive, thrillingly intelligent, and heartfelt novel about parenthood, friendship, loneliness, and strength, about the things we hold sacred as humans and the facts that link us inevitably to a nature we too often ignore.

The Book of Lies was written by English occultist and teacher Aleister Crowley under the pen name of Frater Perdurabo. As Crowley describes it: "This book deals with many matters on all planes of the very highest importance. It is an official publication for Babes of the Abyss, but is recommended even to beginners as highly suggestive." The book consists of 91 chapters, each of which consists of one page of text. The chapters include a question mark, poems, rituals, instructions, and obscure allusions and cryptograms. The subject of each chapter is generally determined by its number and its corresponding Qabalistic meaning.

'The Phoenix and the Turtle' is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. The poem describes a funeral arranged for the deceased Phoenix and Turtledove, respectively emblems of perfection and of devoted love. Some birds are invited, but others excluded. It goes on to state that the love of the birds created a perfect unity which transcended all logic and material fact. It concludes with a prayer for the dead lovers.

A James Herriot for the 21st century recounts his adventures as a newcomer to Newfoundland. When Andrew Peacock made the move from Ontario to Newfoundland, he thought he was kicking off his career as a newly qualified vetenarian with an adventure in a temporary location. It was certainly an adventure, but there was nothing temporary about it. He practiced in Newfoundland for nearly 30 years and is still living there. In fact, he has lived there so long, the locals are starting to think of him as one of them. Creatures of the Rock chronicles a career spent working with and getting to know a rich variety of animals and their owners, on farms, in homes and zoos, and in the wild. Andrew was the only vet for miles around. A day of practice could include anything from a Caesarian section on a cow in a blizzard to freeing a humpback whale from a trap designed for cod to capturing a polar bear after its surprise visit to a bingo parlor. And, on the human side, anything from trying to impress a surpringly large audience of farmers with your first boar castration, to taking care of a family just as well as its stricken cat, to discouraging farm hands from helping themselves to hypodermic needles. All this against the background of a domestic scene in which Andrew's wife Ingrid--also freshly qualified, as a doctor--shares the adventure of making new life, and in due course of starting a family. Told in a series of brief, endlessly engaging stories, Creatures of the Rock is a funny, thrilling, unflinching but ultimately heartwarming narrative about the connections between people and animals, and people with each other.