Service Alert
CD service concludes July 31, 2025
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
Showing 1 - 8 of 8 items
By Susan Juby. 2022
Allegations against his father turn eleven-year-old Rodney's life upside down in a powerful and surprisingly funny novel about new beginnings,…
new friendships and a fresh new look at the way things really are, by critically acclaimed author Susan Juby.Eleven-year-old Rodney is starting sixth grade in a new school, in a new home in a new state. The new school is really old and smells like someone ate a couple of pounds of glue and then barfed it back up, and he's in a class with a bunch of kids who seem to sort of hate him. Even his best friend won't write him back. It's strange, because just a couple of months ago, Rodney was one of the most popular guys in his fifth-grade class. He lived in Las Vegas, with his mom, older sister and his dad, who was a successful professional poker player. Now his old life is over -- his mom even says they shouldn't tell anyone their real last name. Because of something his dad did. Or something people said that he did. His dad says it's all a big misunderstanding, but he's now staying in a center "for people who are having problems, like being addicted to drugs or gambling, or because other people don't understand that you are just funny and friendly and sometimes you give people hugs or put your arm around them and they accuse you of taking liberties and ruin everything." Rodney is confident that it won't be long until the misunderstanding is all cleared up and they can all go back to their old life. But he can only keep the truth at bay for so long . . .By Danny Ramadan. 2022
"A sweeping and mesmerizing story that spans time and mortal space so expertly and elegantly." —Alan CummingA deeply moving novel…
about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.Syria, 2003. A blooming romance leads to a tragic accident when Hussam’s father catches him acting on his feelings for his best friend, Wassim. In an instant, the course of their lives is changed forever.Ten years later, Hussam and Wassim are still struggling to find peace and belonging. Sponsored as a refugee by a controlling older man, Hussam is living an openly gay life in Vancouver, where he attempts to quiet his demons with sex, drugs, and alcohol. Wassim is living on the streets of Damascus, having abandoned a wife and child and a charade he could no longer keep up. Taking shelter in a deserted villa, he unearths the previous owner’s buried secrets while reckoning with his own.The past continues to reverberate through the present as Hussam and Wassim come face to face with heartache, history, drag queens, border guards, and ghosts both literal and figurative.Masterfully crafted and richly detailed, The Foghorn Echoes is a gripping novel about how to carve out home in the midst of war, and how to move forward when the war is within yourself.By Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2022
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE*NATIONAL BESTSELLERAn urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one…
of Canada’s most daring literary talents.An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.By Tsering Yangzom Lama. 2022
A haunting first novel that recounts a Tibetan family’s fifty-year journey through exile and their struggles to forge new lives…
of dignity, love, and hope. A New York Times Book Review Summer Read Pick A Washington Post Noteworthy Book of the Month. In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp on the border of Nepal, having survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas into exile when so many others did not. As Lhamo—haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, the village oracle—tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint, a relic long rumoured to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector’s vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams. Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles.By Emily Seo, Gracey Zhang. 2022
Science nerd Emma Sakamoto wants to reinvent herself. When a popular girl seeks Emma’s help getting a boy to like…
her, Emma applies scientific laws to a perplexing subject—boys. But do people conform to scientific principles? The results are unpredictable in this story about the struggle of fitting in and the complexity of friendship.By Tsering Yangzom Lama. 2022
A haunting first novel that recounts a Tibetan family’s fifty-year journey through exile and their struggles to forge new lives…
of dignity, love, and hope.A New York Times Book Review Summer Read PickA Washington Post Noteworthy Book of the MonthOne of Booklist's Top 10 Historical Fiction DebutsOne of Publishers Weekly's Writers to WatchA Most Anticipated Book - The Millions * Ms. Magazine * BustleLonglisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Toronto Book Awards.In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp on the border of Nepal, having survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas into exile when so many others did not. As Lhamo—haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, the village oracle—tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint, a relic long rumoured to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector’s vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams. Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles.By Kim Spencer. 2022
By Danny Ramadan. 2022
*WINNER OF A 2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BC AND YUKON ETHEL WILSON PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 VANCOUVER…
BOOK AWARD*"A sweeping and mesmerizing story that spans time and mortal space so expertly and elegantly." —Alan CummingA deeply moving novel about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.Syria, 2003. A blooming romance leads to a tragic accident when Hussam&’s father catches him acting on his feelings for his best friend, Wassim. In an instant, the course of their lives is changed forever.Ten years later, Hussam and Wassim are still struggling to find peace and belonging. Sponsored as a refugee by a controlling older man, Hussam is living an openly gay life in Vancouver, where he attempts to quiet his demons with sex, drugs, and alcohol. Wassim is living on the streets of Damascus, having abandoned a wife and child and a charade he could no longer keep up. Taking shelter in a deserted villa, he unearths the previous owner&’s buried secrets while reckoning with his own.The past continues to reverberate through the present as Hussam and Wassim come face to face with heartache, history, drag queens, border guards, and ghosts both literal and figurative.Masterfully crafted and richly detailed, The Foghorn Echoes is a gripping novel about how to carve out home in the midst of war, and how to move forward when the war is within yourself.