Fourteen-year-old Avery Armisted and sixteen-year-old Kayla Butts, once good friends, begrudgingly travel to Spain together for a summer vacation where they uncover a secret their families kept hidden from them their entire lives.

Sylvester “Sly” McMahon is a depressed sixteen-year-old teen who wants nothing more than to die. He’s saved from a suicide attempt by a mysterious stranger, who later turns out to be his not-so-angelic guardian angel Cliff. A chain-smoker with a penchant for sarcastic wit, he’s determined to save Sly from himself. Sly is less than thrilled with the idea of staying alive. The two have to learn how to tolerate each other, even while Cliff keeps stressing the idea that the purpose God has set out for the teen isn’t yet fulfilled.

A gripping tale of psychological suspense perfect for the readership of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, Half Broken Things is a novel that peers into the lives of three dangerously lost people…and the ominous haven they find when they find each other. Jean is a house sitter at the end of a dreary career. Steph is nine months pregnant and on the run. And Michael is a thief. Through a mixture of deceit, good luck, and misfortune, these three damaged loners have come together at a secluded country home called Walden Manor. Now all three have found what they needed most: a new beginning, a little kindness, a little love. Living off the manor’s riches, tending its grounds and gardens, they leave the outside world far behind and build a happiness so long denied them. That is, until the first unexpected visitor arrives...igniting a chain reaction that is at once spellbinding and disastrous. A stunning, thought-provoking crime novel of chilling moral complexity, Half Broken Things is a gripping, haunting exploration of love and our need for it, of the damage done when we go long without it, and the deeds we might be driven to in its name.

“In fact, the higher I climbed, the more I felt the crawling horror of knowledge. At the foot of the stairs, all of truth lay torn open, flayed; with me above it, omniscient and shaking, not looking down.”Broken Things encompasses a world of fractured realities and magic. Here are voices lost inside themselves, where the world is not as it should be and nothing may be trusted. These are the lives that are eked out at the very edges of the city, where God might be found in a bonfire or a bag lady can burst into a flock of pigeons and wild laughter.This book picks at the familiar parts of the everyday and frays them, very slightly, reminding us of the beauty and fear of dreams, of things just glimpsed through the corner of the eye. A woman becomes a gas explosion, or witness to the death of a nameless man in a library. A kitchen knife crawls after a little girl to keep her safe and an old lady hears her mother calling from a cupboard.Broken Things is a book for those who have not outgrown fairytales; for those who like to feel just a little disturbed; for those who remember the ancient creeping of childhood darkness and the exquisite glory of snow.

A novel of exceptional heart and imagination about the ties that bind us to each other, broken and whole, from one of the most exciting voices in Canadian fiction. September, 1983. Fourteen-year-old Bo, a boat person from Vietnam, lives in a small house in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto with his mother, Thao, and his four-year-old sister, who was born severely disfigured from the effects of Agent Orange. Named Orange, she is the family secret; Thao keeps her hidden away, and when Bo's not at school or getting into fights on the street, he cares for her. One day a carnival worker and bear trainer, Gerry, sees Bo in a streetfight, and recruits him for the bear wrestling circuit, eventually giving him his own cub to train. This opens up a new world for Bo--but then Gerry's boss, Max, begins pursuing Thao with an eye on Orange for his travelling freak show. When Bo wakes up one night to find the house empty, he knows he and his cub, Bear, are truly alone. Together they set off on an extraordinary journey through the streets of Toronto and High Park. Awake at night, boy and bear form a unique and powerful bond. When Bo emerges from the park to search for his sister, he discovers a new way of seeing Orange, himself and the world around them. All the Broken Things is a spellbinding novel, at once melancholy and hopeful, about the peculiarities that divide us and bring us together, and the human capacity for love and acceptance.

The world has changed. People live forever, but children are a thing of the past. To meet the demands of want-to-be parents, children have been replaced with androids… very life-like androids. Josh, a twelve-year-old boy, is hit by a truck, leaving him badly damaged. Instead of paying the outrageous cost to fix him, they dump him in the wilderness. Broken Things follows Josh and his journey to a home that doesn't want him anymore, through a setting that darkly mirrors our own. Along the way, he must face the fears of abandoned children, from the wilderness to the city streets, and the predators that dwell in both. His only salvation may rest in finding a single person that cares.

THE CURATOR OF BROKEN THINGS TRILOGY is a fast-paced family-saga that takes place over a century and across four continents. Multiple narrative threads take the reader through love, betrayal, and espionage in a story that spans from the last days of the Ottoman Empire to Paris of the Roaring Twenties to the prewar French Riviera to the World War II Allied landing in North Africa and to modern-day Paris and Los Angeles. In this trilogy, three generations of a family’s secrets are unearthed that might bring it together or tear it apart. Book 1: From Smyrna to Paris. With her twins in college and her ex-husband off to a younger pasture, Cassie is resigned to a disappointing life in Los Angeles, until she reluctantly returns to Paris to visit her ailing father. There, she discovers the existence of an estranged aunt, a woman of many secrets who lives in a beautiful house in Paris’s exclusive Cité des Fleurs. Dumbfounded by what she learns, Cassie sets out on a quest to understand her family’s past and make sense of her father’s cold indifference toward her. In Paris, as the truth about her failed marriage begins to take form, Cassie fights with her family, grapples with French idiosyncrasies and her own, and attempts to resist the charms of a good-looking Parisian who rides a vintage motorcycle. Book 2: Escape to the Côte d' Azur. A family flees Paris at the dawn of the Second World War, haunted by secrets that threaten to rip them apart. Seventy years later, Cassie, in modern-day Paris, finds herself alone frantically trying to confront her hostile relatives. Meanwhile, puzzled by the advances of a charming Frenchman, she struggles to cope with the demands of her manipulative ex and gain an understanding of her true self. Book 3: Resistance in Algiers. Amidst he chaos of the Second World War, and having taken refuge in North Africa, Cassie’s parents and grandparents enter the French Resistance. As the Nazi threat tightens its noose, they find love and risk their lives and one another’s. In modern-day Paris, Cassie, now on the cusp of a surprising and disorienting love interest, has to conquer her fear of failure and success. When the last shocking piece of her family’s puzzle comes into her possession, Cassie must unburden herself from several generations of family secrets.

“Few things are more enjoyable or disturbing than a Joanne Anderton story. They feel like reality with the gravity turned off and, freed from those surly bonds, you float. But beware: broken things lurk in the darkness of space, earth, sea – and they’re hungry.” — Angela Slatter, award-winning author of All the Murmuring Bones A marriage dissolves in the middle of a spacewalk… A lonely robot searches for the remains of a long-lost child… An empty nester is haunted by victims of the bushfires that surround her home… These are tales of breaking and rebuilding, falling apart and being put back together. The stories in The Art of Broken Things blur the line between genres to explore some of our deepest, most fundamentally human concerns: what does it mean to build a family? And what are we willing to sacrifice, to keep that family together? From multiple award-winning author Joanne Anderton comes a new collection of dark science fiction, horror and weird. “Joanne Anderton is a master of the uncanny. Each of her stories is like a torch shone into the dark crevices of the imagination, and you may not always like what they reveal: terror, wonder, and a strange, dark beauty. Highly recommended.” — Helen Marshall, author of The Migration “Joanne Anderton’s stories are deeply atmospheric and powerfully engage the heart and the mind. She imagines futures both dark and entirely too possible, with characters you will come to know intimately. One of this generation’s most talented writers, this collection showcases an author firing on all cylinders.” — Alan Baxter, author of The Gulp and Devouring Dark

Travel to the shores of an alien sea where the search for pearls may cost more than expected. Experience the early days of Viking exploration to the New World, and learn why they didn’t stay. Meet those things that hide in the darkness of attic rooms, the shadows beyond the fenced-in yard, the narrow confines of the kitchen pipes, or even right out in the open beneath a warm summer sun. Learn to be wary of lost children, the kindness of strangers, or even the promises of those you trust. Enjoy the beauty of the sea, the lush growth of greenhouse roses, the love and longing of family, and even the fondness of old memories. “Broken things can be useful, even beautiful…” But they can also be dangerous.