Rita wants to pop her six-year-old son Max in a baggie with a Ziploc top - so she can preserve his innocence and trust, so she won't have to watch him lose faith in the world. Everywhere she looks, she sees chaos. She fears she can never provide Max with the security he craves. His absentee father, a surgeon, seems to have disappeared somewhere into a war zone. All she can offer is love and loyalty, but will it be enough? Rita, who does battle with the mice in her cupboard and the fibroids in her belly, is living on the edge of urban normalcy in a disintegrating family: a mother suffering from a debilitating illness; a sister whose failing marriage is sliding into the sordid domesticity of body hair disgust; a brother enamoured of a God omnipresent in his schizoid mind; and a father wrapped in lottery fever. Suddenly, an incident upsets the fragile balance between hope and fear in Rita's life, setting in motion events that bring her to the brink of despair. Teaching Pigs to Sing creates a recognizable world of urban decay - of hospital waiting rooms, donut shops, vandalized cars, stolen goods, scary parks. But in this precarious world, made even more tentative by the inability of men and women to love one another, Strube, with wit and compassion, can still find resilience and glimmers of hope.

Teaching Pigs to Sing

Strube, Cordelia

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins Canada

Vivid and fresh and finely crafted, this is a book that will strike a chord with anyone who has loved, lived, or wondered how we manage, in the face of our fragility, to carry on.”  Nino RicciThis is the story of Zee, an aimless ex-lawyer who has turned his inability to make a decision into a fine art, and his wife, Alex, a practical and hard-working social worker who feels her biological clock ticking loudly. Reverberating with the emotional crises of the urban adult, Alex & Zee is an offbeat portrait of contemporary relationships, full of wickedly astute observations of city life and its multifarious life forms. Grimly hilarious at every turn, this is a terrific debut novel.Nominated for the 1995 W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the recipient of widespread critical acclaim, Alex & Zee is the long-awaited reissue of Cordelia Strube’s biting take on contemporary romance.

Alex & Zee

World Literature

Told with such humour and suspense that it’s hard to put down...A rare achievement, an unstintingly honest, hilarious, and dreadful delight.”  Globe and MailGreer Pentland is having a challenging year. Her teenaged son, Sam, is on trial for the murder of two senior citizens, a crime allegedly committed while he was sleepwalking. Greer is also battling breast cancer, a disease that has left her with a litany of physical side effects and deep anger toward the incompetence of the medical profession.Yet, in the face of all these obstacles, Greer’s story is full of hope and delicious dark humour. Her indelible strength is fuelled by her unconditional love for her son and the moral support she receives from her 88-year-old aunt, a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling, vitamin-popping senior whose continual commentary on the morbid news of the day is wickedly funny and provocative. This novel about one courageous woman’s fight to survive in a post-millennium culture gone mad is heroic, heart stopping, and affecting.The Barking Dog, the fifth novel from Cordelia Strube, Canada’s pre-eminent writer of urban fiction, is an unforgettable portrait of modern life in these media-saturated, apocalyptic times.

The Barking Dog: A Novel

Literary

Thomas Allen Publishers

Blind Night: A Novel

"It maddens Alex that there has never been anyone in her life she has liked as much as Zee. Never been anyone who could make her laugh when she felt ready to put her fist through the wall. Never been anyone she's felt could withstand all forces of her personality, both negative and positive. Pushing through the turnstile, she thinks he'd probably be better off without her. He could smoke himself to death, drink himself to death, sit in the bath and never clean the ring; he could think about whatever he thinks about for hours. He wouldn't have her to remind him that the day is over, that it's meal time, bed time. He could just stay the same twenty-four hours a day, an amoeba; a simple microscopic organism. A blob." "When Daisy leaves to do her volunteer work at the hospital, Zee pulls down the blinds and unplugs the phone. Sitting in her pink bathtub, he thinks it's wonderful that he can unplug the phone and not answer the door; that he can disconnect. He couldn't disconnect with Alex around. Now he doesn't have to do anything, doesn't have to go to the park or a bar because he doesn't have to keep out of her way .... Leaning his head back against the rim, he tries to decide what to do with his day. He could go for a walk, or maybe a movie. He could do his laundry or go for a donut. He sets his feet on either side of the faucet, thinking that it's quite peaceful really. Without her. Maybe it's better this way...."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

United States

Coach House Pr

At the top of her form, Canada's preeminent writer of new urban fiction brings forth her most powerful novel to date. Cordelia Strube conjures up a heart-breaking tale of madness and murder set against the ravages of cancer. In this, in her fifth novel, Strube tells the story of Greer Pentland, a forty-something realtor, who is battling cancer while struggling to find redemption and hope for her teenaged son Sam, who is on trial for the vicious murder of two senior citizens while sleepwalking. Despite the difficulties that Greer faces, including an ex-husband who wants to sell the house that she and her son live in, this is riveting, provocative, and mordantly funny novel. Strube's searing indictment of the medical profession and our media-saturated culture is masterfully fused together with a stream of new stories and wit making this an unforgettable read.

The Barking Dog

Cordelia, Strube

Thomas Allen & Son

Long-listed for the ReLit Award, 2009 Reese Larkin is desperate to find the perfect mattress. His job is in jeopardy and he’s been forced to separate from his wife and children, but he believes that if he can find the ultimate sleep system his life will begin anew. In her seventh novel, Cordelia Strube grabs readers by the neuroses with a dark but wickedly fun story about a former Greenpeace activist forced to turn marketeer who battles against a world in which he is confronted by shift mattress sales clerks, a Fred and Ginger-obsessed strip-bar waitress, derisive colleagues, and a wife who has mysteriously turned cold and is keeping his children from him. Alone in his damp basement apartment with his daughter’s hamster, he longs for a good night’s sleep and, though faced with despair, begins each day hopefully as he grips tighter to the edges of his life. Engaging, enlightening, and always entertaining, Planet Reese is an intensely personal and endearing tale of a man holding on to his sanity against all odds in an increasingly unhinged world.

Planet Reese

Dundurn Press

Longlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize! Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award! Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she’s never met, her adopted father’s suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn’t left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protégé, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can’t be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise. But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn’t mean that these things don’t find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.

Lemon

Coach House Books

From the acclaimed author of Lemon comes a clever and heartbreaking new novel of love and redemption Shortlisted for the 2016 Toronto Book Award Harriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family. Determined, resourceful, and a little reckless, Harriet tries to navigate the clueless adults around her, dumpster dives for the flotsam and jetsam that fuels her art, and attempts to fathom her complicated feelings for Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus. On the other hand, Irwin’s love for Harriet is not conflicted at all. She’s his compass. But Irwin himself must untangle the web of the human heart. Masterful and mordantly funny, Strube is at the top of her considerable form in this deliciously subversive story of love and redemption.

On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light: A Novel

ECW Press

Told with such humour and suspense that it’s hard to put down...A rare achievement, an unstintingly honest, hilarious, and dreadful delight.”  Globe and MailGreer Pentland is having a challenging year. Her teenaged son, Sam, is on trial for the murder of two senior citizens, a crime allegedly committed while he was sleepwalking. Greer is also battling breast cancer, a disease that has left her with a litany of physical side effects and deep anger toward the incompetence of the medical profession.Yet, in the face of all these obstacles, Greer’s story is full of hope and delicious dark humour. Her indelible strength is fuelled by her unconditional love for her son and the moral support she receives from her 88-year-old aunt, a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling, vitamin-popping senior whose continual commentary on the morbid news of the day is wickedly funny and provocative. This novel about one courageous woman’s fight to survive in a post-millennium culture gone mad is heroic, heart stopping, and affecting.The Barking Dog, the fifth novel from Cordelia Strube, Canada’s pre-eminent writer of urban fiction, is an unforgettable portrait of modern life in these media-saturated, apocalyptic times.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strube, Cordelia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Strube, Cordelia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strube, Cordelia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Teaching Pigs to Sing

Alex & Zee

The Barking Dog: A Novel

Blind Night: A Novel

Alex & Zee

The Barking Dog

Planet Reese

Lemon

On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light: A Novel

The Barking Dog