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Showing 1 - 10 of 10 items

Girl runner
By Carrie Snyder. 2014
Aganetha Smart, a former Olympic athlete famous in the 1920s, is now 104 in a nursing home, forgotten by history.…
When her quiet life is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of two young strangers, Aganetha begins to reflect on her childhood in rural Ontario and her struggles to make an independent life for herself in the city. Without revealing who they are, or what they may want from her, the visitors take Aganetha on an outing from the nursing home. Aganetha’s memories are stirred when the pair return her to the family farm where she was raised. The devastation of WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, the optimism of the 1920s and the sacrifices of the 1930s play out in Aganetha’s mind, as she wrestles with the confusion and displacement of the present. 2014.
A two-spirit journey: the autobiography of a lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder (Critical studies in Native history ; #18)
By Ma-Nee Chacaby, Mary Louisa Plummer. 2016
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills…
from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people. 2016.
The pull of the stars: A novel
By Emma Donoghue. 2020
THE NEW #1 BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE WONDER AND ROOM. Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward…
at the height of the great flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and Room. In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, caregivers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds
Etta and Otto and Russell and James
By Emma Hooper. 2015
Octogenarian Etta has never seen the ocean, so one day she leaves her Saskatchewan home intending to walk all the…
way to the Atlantic. Her husband is left behind, writing Etta letters he never sends and making papier-m³Øch³♭ animals, while neighbor Russell sets off after her. Some strong language. 2015
Dandelion
By Jamie Chai Yun Liew. 2022
When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or…
heard from again. Now a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Brunei. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth. Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging
Jennie's Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood
By Wayne Johnston. 2022
Consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender and at…
times extremely funny memoir of his Newfoundland boyhood.For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. To the neighbours, he was known as "Jennie’s boy," a backhanded salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for Wayne’s condition at the same time as worried he might never grow up. Unable to go to school, Wayne spent his days with his witty, religious, deeply eccentric maternal grandmother, Lucy. During these six months of Wayne’s childhood, he and Lucy faced two life-or-death crises, and only one of them lived to tell the tale. Jennie’s Boy is Wayne’s tribute to a family and a community that were simultaneously fiercely protective of him and fed up with having to make allowances for him. His boyhood was full of pain, yes, but also tenderness and Newfoundland wit. By that wit, and through love—often expressed in the most unloving ways—Wayne survived.
The whispers: A novel
By Ashley Audrain. 2023
From the #1 bestselling author of The Push, a propulsive page-turner about four suburban families whose lives are changed when…
the unthinkable happens—and what is lost when good people make unconscionable choices On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance. Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney’s best friend, suspects something isn’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whitney’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone’s world unravel from her front porch. Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent
Becoming a Matriarch
By Helen Knott. 2023
When matriarchs begin to disappear, there is a choice to either step into the places they left behind, or to…
craft a new space.Helen Knott’s debut memoir, In My Own Moccasins, wowed reviewers, award juries, and readers alike with its profoundly honest and moving account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and survival. Now, in her highly anticipated second book, Knott returns with a chronicle of grief, love, and legacy.Having lost both her mom and grandmother in just over six months, forced to navigate the fine lines between matriarchy, martyrdom, and codependency, Knott realizes she must let go, not just of the women who raised her, but of the woman she thought she was.Woven into the pages are themes of mourning, sobriety through loss, and generational dreaming. Becoming a Matriarch is charted with poetic insights, sass, humour, and heart, taking the reader over the rivers and mountains of Dane Zaa territory in Northeastern British Columbia, along the cobbled streets of Antigua, Guatemala, and straight to the heart of what matriarchy truly means. This is a journey through pain, on the way to becoming.
What I Know About You
By Éric Chacour. 2024
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo. In…
a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek's entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family's strong women, he starts to do just that ́ until a patient's son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men's unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background. The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time? From Cairo's grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal's grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart by an epic love. "This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montr©♭al, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame." ́ Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter. A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
Watch out for her: A novel
By Samantha M. Bailey. 2022
Sarah Goldman, mother to six-year-old Jacob, is relieved to move across the country. She has a lot she wants to…
leave behind, especially Holly Monroe, the pretty twenty-two-year-old babysitter she and her husband, Daniel, hired to take care of their young son last summer. It started out as a perfect arrangement—Sarah had a childminder her son adored, and Holly found the mother figure she'd always wanted. But Sarah's never been one to trust very easily, so she kept a close eye on Holly, maybe too close at times. What she saw raised some questions, not only about who Holly really was but what she was hiding. The more Sarah watched, the more she learned—until one day, she saw something she couldn't unsee, something so shocking that all she could do was flee. Sarah has put it all behind her and is starting over in a different city with her husband and son. They've settled into a friendly suburb where the neighbors, a tight clique of good citizens, are always on the lookout for danger. But when Sarah finds hidden cameras in her new home, she has to wonder: Has her past caught up to her, and worse yet, who's watching her now?