Meredith Hambrock and Jeanette Lynes in Conversation at Queen Books

Join authors Meredith Hambrock and Jeanette Lynes while they discuss their latest novels (She's a Lamb! and The Paper Birds).

Join Meredith Hambrock ( She's a Lamb! ) and Jeanette Lynes ( The Paper Birds ) at Queen Books for an evening of lively discussion, readings and book signings.

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SHE'S A LAMB! (April 8, ECW Press)

A darkly comic suspense in the vein of All's Well and Yellowface , She's a Lamb! is an edgy and incisive novel that marches toward showtime with a growing unease about the dangers of magical thinking and the depths of delusion

Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver's smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that's why the part of Maria in the theater's upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it's going to be.

Jessamyn may have been relegated to the position of childminder for the little brats playing the von Trapp children, but it's so obvious she's there for a different reason — the director wants her close to the role so when Samantha, the lead, inevitably fails, Jessamyn will be there to take her place in the spotlight.

This must be it. Because if it isn't, well, then every skipped meal, every brutal rehearsal, every inch won against a man attempting to drag her down will have all been for nothing.

Sharp, relentless, and darkly funny, She's a Lamb! is a cutting satire about the grotesque pall patriarchy casts over one woman's delusional quest to achieve her dreams and the depths she will sink to for a chance at the life she's convinced she deserves.

Meredith Hambrock 's debut novel Other People's Secrets was called “audacious” and “fabulous” by the New York Times . She has been a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize and worked extensively in television, most recently in the writers' room for the Canadian Screen Award-winning sitcom Corner Gas Animated . She lives in Saskatoon.

THE PAPER BIRDS (June 10, Harper Avenue)

Imagine you have only a pencil and paper, and your puzzle-solving skills to help end the war

Gemma Sullivan lands a coveted office job in the summer of 1943, only to discover that she's been hired to work in a top-secret codebreaking office in an unsuspecting house along the lake in Mimico, Ontario.

The ‘Cottage' - run by the brilliant, eccentric Miss Fearing, who was trained at England's Bletchley Park - pulls Gemma in with its urgent lure and mystery. But along with this job comes a lifelong oath of secrecy.

Gem can't tell anyone what she does for work, not even her elderly Aunt Wren, who has raised her since the age of three after the tragic death of her parents. Her aunt harbors of a deep love of crosswords and Tarot cards and an equally passionate hatred for war since the death of her own fiancée in WWI. The last thing she'd want for her niece is a job that involves anything to do with the war.

The codebreaking is intense, mind-numbing, at times, but as Gem is pulled deeper into wartime intelligence work, she becomes an integral part of the codebreakers' circle. The Cottage codebreaking unit is small but determined, but in order to be successful, they must learn to work together. But when Gem begins fraternizing with a handsome prisoner at a POW camp nearby - who later disappears - she risks losing everything.

The Paper Birds is a WWII love story that reveals the struggles and sacrifices of every day working women during the war and highlights the previously unknown codebreaking work undertaken by women in Canada during the war.

JEANETTE LYNES is the author of the bestselling novel The Apothecary's Garden , a finalist for a High Plains Book Award and two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her second novel, The Small Things That End the World , won the Fiction Prize at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her first novel, The Factory Voice , was longlisted for the Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. She has also written seven books of poetry. Her forthcoming non-fiction book Apron Apocalypse: Lyric Essays received the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award. A settler, Jeanette Lynes grew up on the traditional territory of the People of the Three Fires: the Ojibway, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations of Anishinabek peoples. Since 2011 she has directed the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis.