AUTHORS: Charlotte Gill, Robert Hough, Kim Thúy

Charlotte Gill began planting trees at 19. After 17 seasons and having planted more than 1 million trees, Gill has worked on the Canadian Shield, in foothills of the Albertan Rockies and in many parts of British Columbia. She is the author of the story collection Ladykiller, a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award and winner of the Danuta Gleed Award and the BC Book Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction and a Globe 100 Best Book of the Year, Gill’s Eating Dirt follows a treeplanter’s vivid story of a unique subculture and the magical life of the forest.

Critically acclaimed author Robert Hough has written four novels including The Final Confession of Mabel Stark which was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and for the Trillium Book Award, The Stowaway, and The Culprits. Hough shares his latest novel Dr. Brinkley’s Tower, a sensational, passionate story of jealousy and greed set against the backdrop of Mexico in the 1930s.

Kim Thúy has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, and restaurant owner. She currently lives in Montreal where she devotes herself to writing. Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman, Thúy presents her Governor General’s Literary Award-winning Ru, a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.

Becky Toyne (Canada/UK) is a books columnist, editor and publicist based in Toronto. She is a regular contributor to CBC Radio One and Open Book: Toronto, and a part-time bookseller at Toronto indie bookstore Type. Find her online at beckytoyne.com

In a tiny Mexican border town in 1931, the only industry is a run-down brothel. Enter Dr. Romulus Brinkley and his gargantuan radio tower, built to broadcast his revolutionary goat-gland fertility operation. Word of the new prosperity spreads, and the town is overrun by the impoverished, the desperate, and the flat-out criminal. The tower's frequencies are so powerful the whole area glows green, and the signal is soon broadcasting through every bit of metal it can find. Meanwhile, Dr. Brinkley has attracted the affections of Corazon’s most beautiful resident. But is he really all that he seems?

Charlotte Gill spent 20 years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world. Here, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance. She looks at logging, touches on the versatility of wood, and celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.

Spanning the globe from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec, Ru tells the story of a young girl who feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters again become rough: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism.