The Grimoire of Kensington Market

The downtown core of Toronto is being consumed by Elysium, a drug that allows its users to slip through the permeable edges of this world and then consumes them utterly. Peddled by the icy Srebrenka, few have managed to escape the drug and its dealer. But Maggie has.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," The Grimoire of Kensington Market is the story of Maggie, guardian of The Grimoire bookstore, which expands and contracts as stories are born . . . or die. Only those who are destined to find The Grimoire enter through its front door. But one day a messenger arrives with a mysterious note that reads, "follow me." The next day, another note arrives and then another. The messages, Maggie realizes, are from her brother, Kyle, who has fallen under the influence of the Elysium. Kyle has gone too far into the Silver World and needs his sister, a recovering addict herself, to rescue him.

Driven by guilt and love in equal measure, Maggie sets off on a quest where bands of robbers stalk the woods, tavern keepers weave clouds to hide mountains and caribou fly on the Northern Lights. A journey where dreams and the dead both come to life.

Lauren B. Davis is the author of The Grimoire of Kensington Market; Against a Darkening Sky; The Empty Room, named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the National Post, the Winnipeg Free Press, Amazon and the Coast; and Our Daily Bread, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the Globe & Mail and the Boston Globe. Her other books include the bestselling and critically acclaimed novels The Radiant City, a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and The Stubborn Season, one of the Top 15 Bestselling First Novels by Amazon and Books in Canada, as well as two short story collections, An Unrehearsed Desire and Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives.

Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and the ReLit Award, and she is the recipient of two Mid-Career Writer Sustaining grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. Lauren was born in Montreal and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. For more information, please visit her website at www.laurenbdavis.com.