RANDOM HOUSE CANADA – serie

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD A hard-hitting and powerful look at hockey's moment of reckoning in Canada, and the ways in which a game that is so universally loved has been rocked in recent years by court cases involving sexual assault and startling incidents of hazing and abuse throughout junior hockey.The allegations read like a scene out of a horror movie.Five National Hockey League players, all of them 18 to 20-year-old Canada World Juniors at the time, were alleged to have sexually assaulted a young woman in a London, Ontario, hotel room in June 2018 over several hours. When the players learned that the alleged victim had reported the incident to the police, they allegedly coerced her to drop the complaint and colluded to make sure their stories lined up. Hockey Canada kept the details of the case out of the spotlight and  came to a confidential financial settlement with the plaintiff, paid out of a secret slush fund worth millions of dollars that the organization kept on hand to settle such complaints quietly.On May 26, 2022, TSN investigative reporter Rick Westhead broke the story surrounding the Team Canada junior players and Hockey Canada's handling of the case, immediately sending shock waves throughout all levels of the hockey world. Charges of sexual assault were made against the players; all of whom entered pleas of not guilty. Once the story went live on the TSN website, Westhead's inbox on X filled with messages from people who wanted to share their personal stories on how they had been impacted by hockey's toxic culture.For over three years the story ignited an enormous amount of debate and discussion across the country. Even after the players were acquitted of all charges in July, 2025, the conversation about how broken the national game had become only intensified.In We Breed Lions, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Rick Westhead does a deep-dive into the state of hockey in Canada today. He gives voice to those who have been sexually assaulted by hockey players, revealing the struggles they've had with local police officials in their efforts to seek justice. He also goes inside the dressing room to find out how attitudes of misogyny and homophobia continue to flourish, and speaks to former players who were forced to perform degrading acts of initiation in order to “be one of the guys.”Looming large in Westhead's extraordinary reporting are the gatekeepers of the game—league officials, team owners and members of the sport's governing bodies—who are reluctant to impose change from the outside and willing to sacrifice the well-being of their players and the community for profit.Westhead offers hope for hockey's future, profiling those individuals and organizations who are committed to educating players around issues of consent, putting an end to hazing and redefining what it means to be a man on and off the ice. Featuring a Foreword by bestselling author Stephen Brunt, We Breed Lions is must-reading for parents, players and all of those who love the game of hockey and want to see it get to a better place.

The first book in The Binding Chronicles, Tethered is a darkly seductive romantasy for fans of A Court of Thorns and Roses and The Serpent and the Wings of Night, blending forbidden love, dangerous magic and a bond that defies fate.What could be worse than an arranged marriage to a vampire prince?When Luna is sold into marriage to the vampire Prince of Darkness, she expects cruelty, not temptation. Prince Sebastian was made to obey his queen, even if that means binding himself to a mortal he doesn't want and burying every trace of the humanity he lost centuries ago. But the moment their blood mingles during the Binding Ceremony, something ancient and forbidden ignites between them.Now bound by a magic neither understands and incapable of going more than thirty feet apart, Luna and Sebastian are trapped in each other’s orbit—tethered but unwilling to surrender. As political schemes twist into betrayal and war brews on the horizon, desire becomes their greatest danger. Loving each other could cost them their crowns, their kingdoms and their lives.Steeped in dark magic, aching passion and impossible choices, Tethered is a sweeping gothic romantasy about two enemies bound by fate and undone by love.

It's all fun and games until somebody dies. Delve into the unsettling world of Hollow Twilight, a Ready Player One meets Stranger Things LitRPG where there's no XP to collect and no loot to scavenge, but one wrong move could be the difference between life and death.Reid, a seemingly average high school senior, is bored of his meaningless life. That is, until he and his friends learn about a new mobile game, Hollow Twilight, and decide to give it a shot. But what starts as a strangely immersive dark fantasy RPG turns out to be far more as the teens realize they've literally crossed over into the game world and must now fight the shadowy monsters hunting them with no clear understanding of how to survive. It’s do or die for the group, which is par for the course in video games. But in Hollow Twilight, to die doesn’t just mean an inconvenient respawn, and when one of their party members is killed by a vicious monster known as a Pariah, it results in their real-life death.Addicted to mastering the dark power he's been assigned—while ignoring the voice in his head that comes with it—Reid is caught between his desire to keep playing and the very real possibility that he could die if he does. But can he find a way to protect his friends and defeat the Pariahs? The alternative is a return to the mundane life of a nobody, and that just might be more than he can bear.