Hailed as a remarkable collection of short stories when it was first released in 1992, We So Seldom Look on Love is Barbara Gowdy’s wholly original and powerful look at what constitutes the ever-revolving realm of love.

A young, beautiful, female necrophile, obsessed with the moment that life turns to death, begins an intense relationship with a medical student that inevitably leads to tragedy. This short story was the basis for the critically acclaimed film Kissed. Hailed as “remarkable and uplifting” by The Globe and Mail and published to equally glowing acclaim around the world, Barbara Gowdy’s groundbreaking collection of stories, We So Seldom Look on Love, pushes past the limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

The White Bone, ostensibly about an elephant gifted with visionary powers, is a highly imaginative novel about an infinitely gentle species fighting to survive in a mad world of game poachers and environmental disaster.

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2017 "[A] supernatural domestic thriller and a crackling tour de force." —The New York Times Thunderstorms are rolling across the summer sky. Every time one breaks, Rose Bowan loses consciousness and has vivid, realistic dreams about being in another woman's body. Is Rose merely dreaming? Or is she, in fact, inhabiting a stranger? Disturbed yet entranced, she sets out to discover what is happening to her, leaving the cocoon of her family’s small repertory cinema for the larger, upended world of someone wildly different from herself. Meanwhile her mother is in the early stages of dementia, and has begun to speak for the first time in decades about another haunting presence: Rose’s younger sister. In Little Sister, one woman fights to help someone she has never met, and to come to terms with a death for which she always felt responsible. With the elegant prose and groundbreaking imagination that have earned her international acclaim, Barbara Gowdy explores the astonishing power of empathy, the question of where we end and others begin, and the fierce bonds of motherhood and sisterhood.

From the internationally acclaimed author of The White Bone and The Romantic, a haunting and suspenseful novel of abduction and obsessive love Nine-year-old Rachel Fox has the face of an angel, a heart-stopping luminosity that strikes all who meet her. Her single mother, Celia, working at a video store by day and a piano bar by night, is not always around to shield her daughter from the attention—both benign and sinister—that her beauty draws. Attention from model agencies, for example, or from Ron, a small-appliance repairman who, having seen Rachel once, is driven to see her again and again. When a summer blackout plunges the city into darkness and confusion, Rachel is taken from her home. A full-scale search begins, but days pass with no solid clues, only a phone call Celia receives from a woman whose voice she has heard before but cannot place. And as Celia fights her terror and Rachel starts to trust in her abductor's kindness, the only other person who knows where she is wavers between loyalty to the captor and saving the child. Will Rachel be found before her abductor's urge to protect and cherish turns to something altogether less innocent? Tapping into the fear that lies just below the surface of contemporary city life, Barbara Gowdy draws on her trademark empathy and precision to create a portrait of love at its most consuming and ambiguous and to uncover the volatile point at which desire gives way to the unthinkable.

'One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.' So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

This cleverly conceived flip story, which ends in the middle and starts from either side, will show you what love looks like from both a child and a parent's perspective. With a simple, touching story, rhyme and rhythm, and vibrant childlike illustrations, this book is a timeless gift you will share again and again.