I Still Have A Suitcase In Berlin 2008

Synopsis: 1932 seemed the perfect year to move to Berlin.

Leaving behind a Halifax scarred by war and a country mired in Depression, a young Canadian named Michael Renner turns a family errand to Berlin into a chance to embrace his German roots. Entranced by a capital that is surging in spirit, buoyed after years of crippling humiliation by the rising tide of National Socialism, Michael marries and becomes a father. He even finds success, first taking a job with his father-in-law, auctioning the property of those forced to flee the new Germany, then by managing a punch-card census cataloguing the European Jews.

But the poisonous dogma binding Michael to his new life begins to unravel. While his family and friends reassure Michael that the cruelties of nationalization are a necessity, he strays. Berlin’s legendary sexual underworld, a place where masochistic cabarets mimic the spiralling violence on the streets above, proves to be dangerously irresistible...as does the prostitute Michael turns to for solace.

"I Still Have A Suitcase In Berlin" is a deceptively subtle story about the way ordinary people slip naively into horror, and how in times of moral chaos, disgrace might be the only place a man of principles can live with himself.

Miss Elva 2005Synopsis: A haunting canvas of jealousy, betrayal and atonement that can take its rightful place alongside Anne Marie MacDonald's "Fall On Your Knees" and David Adam Richards' "Mercy Among The Children".

1970. A tiny fisherman’s shack on the dark Nova Scotia coast, eccentrically covered with folk art images (à la Maud Lewis), which are all the work of a benign, disfigured mute whom the locals dismiss as a misshapen nobody. Miss Elva. Only one man knows that the whimsical, primitive art old Elva painfully creates is her voice, damning the madness of love and lamenting decades of lies.

He is also the only person still alive who remembers Elva as she was in the summer of 1927, a crippled little thing in the shadow of her beautiful half-sister, Jane. That peculiar summer of snow and rum-runners when the black sheep Gil returned to a troubled town for his father’s funeral, dogged by sin and retribution ... only to find that his handsome twin brother, Dom, has become Jane’s lover. The unhappy reunion breeds rivalry and self-loathing, complicated by racial violence and religious intolerance. And Elva, missing nothing and hoping to free those she loves from pain, unwittingly unleashes the fire that destroys them all.

A master of narrative tension, Stephens Gerard Malone saves one last twist for the end ... the “miracle” of redemption ... driving home his evocative tale of jealousy and its disturbing consequences.

Endless Bay (written under the name Laura Fairburn) 1994

SYNOPSIS: "Endless Bay" opens innocently. Montreal scholar Rhea Northway's life, both personal and professional, is at a standstill. Her solution is to write the definitive biography of the great 19th century Canadian novelist, Charles D'Arnell, the mysterious author of Lenora, a sweeping, romantic and tragic story about making the greatest sacrifice... death and dishonour... for love.

However, without her knowledge, Rhea's interest in the novel and her work on the biography starts a harrowing descent into obsession, as she leaves her husband behind and travels first to Haworth, England, and then to Endless Bay, Nova Scotia, in search of information about D'Arnell. All of those touched deeply by D'Arnell's novel and Rhea's obsession... D'Arnell's living relatives, Rhea, her husband, and fellow student Abelard Hearn... come under the influence of the shadow cast across time by D'Arnell, and are caught by Lenora's destructive power, as if by the power of the sea, pounding against the cliffs at D'Arnell's place of death, Endless Bay.

Endless Bay is a compelling, tragic story of the deadly price of blind ambition. Literature, history, and passion intermingle in this absorbing tale of passion and deception.