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The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over…
the centuries—from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie &“A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers . . . It does not resemble any other novel I could name.&”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: TIME, The Toronto Star, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times, The Week, CNBC, Business Insider, Kirkus Reviews, and Literary HubIn the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl&’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana&’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—&“victory city&”—the wonder of the world.Over the next 250 years, Pampa Kampana&’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga&’s, from its literal sowing from a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry—with Pampa Kampana at its center.Brilliantly narrated in the style of an ancient epic, Victory City is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.
Dinner can be equal parts impressive and simple any day of the week. Sometimes all you need is a little…
inspiration and a cabbage—and this book!In A Generous Meal, Christine Flynn shows us—contrary to popular belief—that you don&’t need a lot of time, money, or know-how to make good food. A simple potato can transform a so-so day into something special, a soup can warm you in more ways than one, and baking a chocolate cake is just another way of shouting, &“I love you!&” at the top of your lungs. A Generous Meal is a modern cookbook of over 100 recipes that anyone—from a novice to an experienced chef like Christine—can use to whip up restaurant-quality meals with ease. Maybe you are having people over and want to put out some crusty bread and serve an array of simple starters like Butter Beans in Salsa Verde or Warm Chorizo in Sidra that will get everyone nibbling. Or, perhaps you&’re looking for a vegetable forward weeknight meal like Spicy Oven Charred Cabbage and Lemons. Seafood dishes, including Herb Stuffed Rainbow Trout or Cod and Zucchini in Curry Coconut Broth, offer good variety, and meaty mains like Crispy Chicken Thighs over Vinegar Beans or Lamb Loin Chops over Minty Pistachio Butter are perfect any day of the week—and just as impressive to serve to guests. And what is a meal without the possibility of dessert? Satisfy your post-dinner sweet tooth cravings with recipes like Caramel Pecan Ice Cream Crumble Cake or Polenta Biscuits with Sweet Corn Cream and Strawberries. The recipes in A Generous Meal are fresh, comforting, easy to follow, and the best part? They are enjoyable to cook and eat.
A dazzling collection of fifteen short stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and…
The Testaments.Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood&’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; &“Impatient Griselda&” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and &“My Evil Mother&” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.
An unprecedented glimpse into the sex lives of female and gender-expansive Muslims living across Canada and the United States.In the…
Muslim world, sex is permissible (or halal) only within the confines of marriage. Outside of wedlock, the act is considered haram, a sin of the faith. Girls are taught to protect their virginity; their mothers, if not forgoing &“the talk&” altogether, obscure the facts with elliptical language and metaphors.So, what happens when immigrants and the children of immigrants set about pursuing an open and active sex life on a more sexually liberated continent, amid western peers and attitudes? The six deeply personal stories in Halal Sex attempt to answer this question, bringing a hushed conversation out into the open.Within these pages you&’ll meet Azar, a non-binary trans Sufi; Bunmi, a Nigerian navigating shame and Tinder; Eman, a lesbian stand-up comic in an interfaith marriage; Taslim, a virgin in her forties struggling to erect healthy boundaries; and Khadijah, an exotic dancer and sex worker.With great empathy, Sheima Benembarek makes space for the honesty and vulnerability of each participant and handles their stories with gentleness and care. What emerges is a tapestry of a diverse Islam—encompassing a wide variety of cultural and religious and socioeconomic backgrounds—and a frank, feminist contribution to the advancement of Muslim sexual education and pleasure.
One of The Millions&’ &“Most Anticipated Books of 2023One of The New York Times&’ &“19 Works of Nonfiction to Read…
This Spring&”A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.&“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.&” —from &“Note 18&” in Ordinary NotesA singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Through the striking images and words in these pages, themes and tones echo: sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature—but always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author&’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. &“I learned to see in my mother&’s house,&” writes Sharpe. &“I learned how not to see in my mother&’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.&” Using these and other gifts and ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,&” collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a &“Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,&” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
In his poignant memoir, Charles Foran presents a portrait of his gruff-but-fond father wrestling with the end of life as…
Charlie acts as witness, solace, and would-be guide while facing his own mortality. What story can we tell ourselves and those we love, this radiant book asks, to withstand the inevitable mutability of time and self? A powerful meditation on fathers and sons, love and loss, and what it means to be alive "just once, no more."Dave Foran was a formidable man of few words, from a different era than his sensitive, literary son, Charlie. As a younger person, Dave had lived alone for months in the bush, overcome snow blindness, hauled a dead body across a frozen lake on a dogsled, dodged bullets in a bar, and gone toe-to-toe with a bear. Some aspects of his life were rollicking while others were more restrained: A decent father and a devoted husband, Dave was also emotionally distant, prone to laconic cynicism and a changeable mood. As Charlie writes: &“He struggled most days of his life with wounds he could not readily identify, let alone heal."The year Charlie turned 55, his 83-year-old father began a slow, final decline, and Charlie surprised himself by wanting to write about their relationship. On the surface, his motiavation was to reassure his father that he was loved. But there was also a deeper desire at work. &“Late into the middle of my own lifespan,&” Charlie writes, &“sadness took hold of my being . . . I wanted to say so frankly, never mind how uncomfortable it made me.&”In spare, haunting prose, Just Once, No More pulls on these delicate threads—unravelling a fascinating personal story and revealing its poignant universality.
A bright, bold and modern Italian cookbook packed with 115+ delicious mix-and-match recipes, plus a few goofs and somethoughts on…
creating a fuller life for yourself and the people around you.A different kind of cookbook, from a different kind of restaurant. The team behind the award-winning Montreal pizza joint Elena presents Salad Pizza Wine, delivering recipes for all of life&’s good things, with fresh, delicious and easy-to-recreate takes on modern Italian dishes, including:Elena&’s famous pizza If you could eat pizza every day and feel great, would you believe it? From heavy-hitters to off-menu pies, the secret to a pizza-filled life is in Elena&’s naturally leavened dough. Salads + Vegetables Like people, this book contains multitudes; you can stuff your face with pizza on the daily and take pleasure in eating vegetables with the seasons. Pasta Learn how to make two super versatile doughs and their multiple variations, and impress your loved ones with an all-star roster of favorite pastas. Meat + Fish Take your pick from weeknight-friendly recipes, dishes to save for special occasions and one once-in-a-lifetime adventure: the gargantuan Timpano, inspired by the classic film Big Night. Hoagies Who doesn&’t love sandwiches? Portable and easy to share with a friend, hoagies are also perfect for wrapping up all your tasty leftovers.Desserts End every meal on a high note with a series of serious sweet treats for beginners and advanced bakers alike. Go-Tos Lay the foundation for your home-cooking adventure with basic recipes that deliver big flavor, from crunchy toasted breadcrumbs and multi-purpose sauces to simple pickles and homemade cheeses.More than a collection of recipes, Salad Pizza Wine shares Elena&’s passion for natural wines too—the wine part of Salad Pizza Wine—as well as their goofs and thoughts on living a fuller life. The authors—Janice, Stephanie, Ryan, Marley—were part of Elena&’s opening team who came together, burnt out from years in the restaurant industry and ready to start afresh. Their answer was to create a restaurant that was also a healthy working environment (gasp). At Elena, it&’s all about making the most of a good thing—and the same goes for this book. Whether it&’s planning a dinner (salad, pizza, wine? pizza, pasta, dessert? salad, meat, hoagie?), or letting go of stuff that no longer serves you, Salad Pizza Wine encourages you to choose your own adventure—both in the kitchen and in life.Written in a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek style, this is a cookbook you&’ll really want to cook from, as well as to read. Because what&’s better than cooking beautiful food, being kind to those around us and laughing as we all try to figure it out?
An engrossing, page-turning story about an introverted student and the mysterious older woman whose unexpected interest in her sparks an…
insidious, all-consuming love affair.Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived for her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for an unfamiliar city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. Chatty, confident Clara from down the hall, who wants to be her friend; intense, determined Rachel from her poetry class, who is going to be a writer. Natalie doesn't know what she wants. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone.Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora's orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off campus at Nora's home, enveloped by the intensity of her feelings and the version of adulthood she imagines Nora leads. Worried about how her floormates will react to news of her relationship with a woman, Natalie explains her absence by inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul; she carefully protects the intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an alarming shape in Natalie's life, even as Natalie tries to look away. What, or who, is Nora hiding?The Adult is a startlingly gorgeous and perceptive debut novel examining identity, love, insecurity, desire, and deceit.
In this tense, spellbinding thriller set over the course of a single day, a woman prepares for a party that…
goes dreadfully wrong—for fans of Ashley Audrain and Lisa Jewell.Nadine Walsh&’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbors all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything&’s going according to plan. But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this? Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother&’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns, and her mother—only her mother knows that today isn&’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well. Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they&’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it&’s hard to forget when Nadine&’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happen when her guests unite.
Say goodbye to ho-hum canned beans and freeze-dried camping meals. With prep-ahead recipes and field-tested advice, flavor-packed dishes suchas herby…
lemon chicken and fire-baked sticky buns become deliciously doable and fuss-free—whether you&’re in the wilderness or your own backyard.In this game-changing camping cookbook, food writer and outdoorsman Chris Nuttall-Smith introduces an ingenious prep-ahead approach that gets most (or even all) of the cooking done before a trip ever begins. Each recipe is divided into &“at home&” and &“at camp&” sections, so on your trip, many recipes have you simply drop fully prepped ingredients into a pot or onto a grill. Just like that, you&’ll be dining on showstopping Sweet-Tangy Lemon Ribs or Sizzling Cumin Lamb Kebabs paired with Puff-and-Serve Chapati.Plus, learn about the best-traveling cheeses, how to chill drinks when you don&’t have ice, how to pick (and use) the right camp stove, and how to make great coffee outdoors! Cook It Wild proves that cooks and campers of every level can have the most spectacular campfire meals.
The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth.“Can I kiss you?” It…
was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back. With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do, until enough was enough. Full of behind the scenes details and intimate interrogations on sex, love, trauma, and Hollywood, Pageboy is the story of a life pushed to the brink. But at its core, this beautifully written, winding journey of what it means to untangle ourselves from the expectations of others is an ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength, and joy.
From the heart of the Labrador Current to the furthest reaches of our global oceans, Message in a Bottle conjures…
an exquisite diversity of marine life and warns of a central threat to its survival: ocean plastic.The dovekie is a stocky seabird the size of a child&’s heart that spends its winters on the coast of Newfoundland, thriving in one of the toughest climates on Earth. The polar bear is an apex predator, designed to persevere in the Arctic's extreme conditions. The North Atlantic right whale outweighs the humpback by more than twenty tons and feeds on enormous quantities of tiny plankton in northeastern waters before migrating south for the winter. In Message in a Bottle, wildlife biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings to extraordinary life the wonder and resilience of these creatures and many other birds, fish and marine mammals she has encountered in sea voyages from the Arctic to the Antarctic oceans. However, in her travels she has noticed a troubling pattern: the constant presence of plastic, in the form of adrift fishing gear ("ghost gear"), garbage and micro-plastics which form an invisible but pervasive smog in our oceans and threaten even the most seemingly resilient forms of sea life.Bringing together nature, science and adventure writing, Hogan shines a light on our plastic-addicted lifestyle and offers a compelling, eyewitness account of its devastating effects on the marine environment—70% of our planet. With lyrical prose and a reverential eye for the majesty and fragility of our natural world, Message in a Bottle is a clarion call to protect global oceans and the life they sustain, including our own.
'A darkly gorgeous fantasy that sparkles with snow and magic, this book wholly enchanted me' Sangu Mandanna, author of The…
Very Secret Society of Irregular WitchesEnter the world of the hidden folk - and discover the most whimsical, enchanting and heart-warming tale you'll read this year, featuring the intrepid Emily Wilde. . .Emily Wilde is good at many things: she is the foremost expert on the study of faeries; she is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encylopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby But as Emily gets closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones - the most elusive of all faeries - she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all - her own heart.'Forget dark academia: give me instead this kind of winter-sunshined, sharp-tongued and footnoted academia, full of field trips and grumpy romance' Freya Marske, author of A Marvellous Light'Enchanting in every sense of the word. . . This book is real magic' H. G. Parry, author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep'A book so vividly, endlessly enchanting, so crisply assured, so rich and complete and wise and far-reaching in its worldbuilding that you'll walk away half ensorcelled, sure Fawcett found Emily Wilde's journal in some sea-stained trunk' Melissa Albert'The ideal book to curl up with on a chilly winter's evening. . . this book is an absolute delight.' Megan Bannen, author of The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy'A charmingly whimsical delight. . . Five dazzling, gladdening stars' India Holton, author of The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels'I enjoyed every word of this gorgeously written fairy tale featuring a grumpy heroine and an utterly charming love interest' Isabel Ibañez, author of Woven In Moonlight
One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world&’s most prolific art thief,…
Stéphane Breitwieser. • &“The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."—The New Yorker "Enthralling." —The Wall Street JournalIn this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser&’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser&’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart&’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict&’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend&’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.
The marvelous tale of one fish, the fisherman who first caught her, and how our insatiable appetite for bluefin tuna…
turned a cottage industry into a massive global dilemma.In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish's fate.Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin's exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY OPRAH DAILY, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, NPR, LOS…
ANGELES TIMES, ESSENCE AND MORE'Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book' IAN WILLIAMS, GUARDIAN 'Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy' TELEGRAPH'When he moves into a new genre, he keeps the bones but does his own decorating' WASHINGTON POST'A masterpiece' PEOPLE MAGAZINEFrom two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to Harlem Shuffle1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly. 1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney's enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret. 1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt. In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.'A dazzling treatise . . . gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people' NEW YORK TIMES'Funny, effortlessly streetwise, and criminally pleasurable to read it's also politically enlightening and quietly incendiary' BIG ISSUE
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 choicesOn 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.
The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: A searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as…
a baby, escaping war in Cambodia.In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy &“arrival,&” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family. In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son&’s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.
"Absolutely gripping… a perfectly splendid read—I highly, highly recommend it&” -- Douglas Preston, author of the #1 New York Times…
bestseller The Lost City of the Monkey GodA sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news that follows the no-holds-barred battle between two legendary explorers to reach the North Pole, and the newspapers which stopped at nothing to get–and sell–the story.In the fall of 1909, a pair of bitter contests captured the world&’s attention. The American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed to have discovered the North Pole, sparking a vicious feud that was unprecedented in international scientific and geographic circles. At the same time, the rivalry between two powerful New York City newspapers—the storied Herald and the ascendant Times—fanned the flames of the so-called polar controversy, as each paper financially and reputationally committed itself to an opposing explorer and fought desperately to defend him.The Herald was owned and edited by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., an eccentric playboy whose nose for news was matched only by his appetite for debauchery and champagne. The Times was published by Adolph Ochs, son of Jewish immigrants, who&’d improbably rescued the paper from extinction and turned it into an emerging powerhouse. The battle between Cook and Peary would have enormous consequences for both newspapers, and help to determine the future of corporate media. BATTLE OF INK AND ICE presents a frank portrayal of Arctic explorers, brave men who both inspired and deceived the public. It also sketches a vivid portrait of the newspapers that funded, promoted, narrated, and often distorted their exploits. It recounts a sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news, one that culminates with an unjustly overlooked chapter in the origin story of the modern New York Times.By turns tragic and absurd, BATTLE OF INK AND ICE brims with contemporary relevance, touching as it does on themes of class, celebrity, the ever-quickening news cycle, and the benefits and pitfalls of an increasingly interconnected world. Above all, perhaps, its cast of characters testifies—colorfully and compellingly—to the ongoing role of personality and publicity in American cultural life as the Gilded Age gave way to the twentieth century—the American century.
Four generations. Three sisters. One impossible choice. A profoundly moving debut novel spanning India, Uganda, England, and Canada, about how one…
act of survival reverberates across generations of a family and their search for a place of their own. Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, OprahDaily, and Goodreads.India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.Pirbhai&’s children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai&’s granddaughters—sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya—come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri&’s ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin&’s brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world. A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share—and those that remain unspoken.