Melanie is a mother and a lover, middle-aged, eccentric, courageous, and often hilariously unpredictable. She’s also deeply scarred by her internment as a child in Drancy, a Nazi detention camp. Through the humanity and friendship of an English boy, Christopher Lewis, and her self-appointed protector, Jakob Bronski, Melanie managed to survive. Forty years later, Jakob, now a frail, well-known Soviet dissident, and Christopher, a writer who’s never forgotten the young Melanie, reenter her life. Memories of the past, coupled with her husband’s infidelity, upset Melanie’s precarious emotional stability, forcing her to confront the absurdity of trying to balance good and evil, guilt and love, duty and desire. With its finely drawn characters, rich humanity, and rare wit,Emotional Arithmeticis a novel of memory and hope, offering an unforgettable look at how the shadows of the past illuminate the present.

Paul Stevens is a bookseller in the marginalized world of used books, a lover of Flaubert and Dickens, young, unsure of himself - until he meets Judith and is drawn into her secret world.

The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone , first published in 1979, is one of Matt Cohen's four novels that came to be known as the Salem quartet--stories set in the fictional town of Salem in eastern Ontario, somewhere north of Kingston in the rugged farmland and forest of the Canadian Shield. These are the novels that first brought Matt Cohen to national attention. The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone , a story about the pleasure of love that comes late in life, centres on the lives of two time-worn characters whose pursuit of happiness is strangely rewarded. With The Disinherited , another of the Salem novels, this is considered among the author's best works.