ChiZine Publications – förlag

Pray you never find your Summerwood, Grandfather had said. I’d found something worse. I’d found his.In Summerwood, twelve-year old Rosalind Hero Cheung can’t wait to spend the summer in Toronto with her teenaged sister Julie and their famous author grandfather. Years ago Walter Denison wrote a series of bestselling children’s novels about a magical land called the Summerwood. But to Hero’s dismay, Walter is cold toward his granddaughters and Julie derides Hero’s hope that the Summerwood is real.Nevertheless, one day she and Julie stumble into the Summerwood. Ruled by the beautiful and enigmatic Lady of Summer, it is the idyllic fantasy land out of Walter’s books, complete with quaintly dressed talking animals. However, Hero discovers the Summerwood is far more sinister than Walter had ever let on. Julie is abducted and, to save her life, Hero must find the Summerwood’s sacred winter stag. Hero quickly learns that setting out on a fantasy quest is far more prosaic—and terrifying—than she’d ever imagined, and there is a steep and bloody price to pay for being the hero.In Winterwood, three years have passed since Lindy Cheung went into the Summerwood and emerged changed and broken. Now she’s getting into trouble—starting fights, skipping school, dating unsuitable boys. After her mother grounds her—again—she runs off to Toronto to her sister, the only person who knows what really happened three years ago. But Juliet has moved on from the trauma, and Lindy finds herself back in the Summerwood, where an old enemy tells her: The stag must die again.And this time, in order to save the Summerwood, she has to be the bad guy instead of the hero.

Living and working underwater can be a dangerous thing. First the bulkheads sweat, then there’s a trickle of water . . .. . . and then in an instant you’re gone. The only thing left is a bloody pulp in the dark water and crushed bone fragments on the seafloor.And you can’t bolt to the surface in an emergency. . . . The bends will get you.But that’s not the worst. When you’re living underwater and also working as a spy for your city, that’s when things get really dangerous.Truman McClusky has been out of the intelligence business for years, working the kelp farms and helping his city Trieste flourish on the shallow continental shelf just off the coast of Florida. Until his former partner shows up, that is, steals a piece of valuable new technology and makes a mad dash into the Atlantic. Before he knows it, Mac ends up back in the game, chasing the spy to not only recapture the tech, but to kill his former friend.But when he learns the grim truth behind the theft, it sends his stable life into turmoil and plunges him into an even deadlier mission: evade the submarines of hostile foreign powers, escape assassins, and forge through the world’s oceans at breakneck pace on a daring quest to survive, with more lethal secrets than he thought possible in his pocket.The future of the city depends on McClusky . . . if he can make it back home.

From the author of Filaria, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter, and Head Full of Mountains comes Brent Hayward’s debut short story collection, featuring ten stories spanning his career, plus two new, previously unpublished pieces, the novelette Lake of Dreams and the titular novella.In Broken Sun, Broken Moon, the storm has passed but gravity is weak again. The scribe isn’t feeling well. Houses in palmetto break apart and float away. Mechanisms behind the sun and the moon are breaking down. And now government men sail into town, from the capital, bringing with them a newborn perfect—the first in years. They’re looking for the scribe, and they’re not very happy.In Lake of Dreams, George Triplehorn was passed over by rapture when it swept the planet. Dead people either stayed that way or got fed up with conditions and moved to the moon. Like the others left behind, George tried to muddle by, making a living with his new skills as an entertainer, but things just weren’t the same. When Myron, his agent, doctor, and sometimes shrink, lands him a gig in Lake of Dreams, the largest lunar necropolis, George figures it might just be the ticket to boost a flagging career and maybe even get his life back on track. But he’s never been to the moon before, his so-called skills are acting up, and he soon discovers that the dead are not his greatest fans.This collection, like Brent Hayward’s other works, breaks the boundaries of literary science fiction.

Hamilton, Ontario, 1953.A nine-year-old boy meets with a horrific death at the hands of a sociopath; his little body is then hidden away in a soon-to-be-sealed tenement coal chute where it lies for two decades. The remains, discovered by contractors rerouting a pipe in 1974, make for sensational news; the fact that ten small bones are missing causes further speculation. But interest in the cold case fades quickly—except in the imagination of a tragically lonely boy named Scott Campbell, a resident of that sad building who suffers (equally) from undiagnosed Selective Mutism and the terrible neglect of his mentally ill mother. In the building’s furnace room, Scotty meets his one and only friend: a child’s playful, coal-black shadow that follows him through a litany of foster homes and into adulthood. Now, in 1987, thirteen years after the discovery of those remains, Scotty is an enigmatic street artist who makes strange sculptures out of found objects, which he leaves in the forgotten and overlooked corners of the city. Scotty’s social worker, Simon, despairs over Scotty’s plight: the mute will soon be completely on his own, for he aged out of government-sponsored aid almost two years ago and is now living on the remnants of a miracle extension arranged by Simon’s boss. Simon also has his own dilemma: as a Mohawk with invested interest in the Six Nations of the Grand River, he feels like he is betraying his own community by working for the government-funded Children’s Aid Society in Hamilton. Caught between pressure at home and the impending end of Scotty’s meagre support, Simon is losing faith in both the System and himself.Little Bones is a heart-rending tale of loss, redemption, and the cruel consequences of investing in that most beautiful of lies—hope.