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By Fawn Parker. 2024
One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024…
Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know.Shortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?By katherena vermette. 2024
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face…
their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a "pretendian." Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.By Maria Reva. 2025
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction.One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.See LessBy Aimee Wall. 2024
Roman magistral sur les relations féminines intergénérationnelles et la résistance que l’on retrouve dans les endroits les plus improbables, Nous,…
Jane explore la précarité de l’existence rurale et le droit fondamental à l’avortement. Cherchant à donner un sens à sa vie, Marthe entame une amitié intense avec une femme plus âgée, également originaire de Terre-Neuve. Celle-ci lui raconte une histoire de but, de devoir à accomplir qui porte un nom : Jane. Accompagnée par sa nouvelle amie, Marthe quitte sa vie montréalaise et retourne dans une petite communauté de l’ile pour poursuivre le travail d’un mouvement clandestin du Chicago des années 1960 : les services d’avortement pratiqués par des femmes, toujours appelées Jane. Elle s’engage à perpétuer cet héritage et à protéger ses nouvelles connaissances. Mais la noblesse de la tâche et la réalité de la vie en région éloignée entrent en compétition, et les fractures personnelles au sein du petit groupe commencent à se creuser. Nous, Jane sonde l’importance du travail de soins effectué par les femmes pour les femmes, souligne la complexité des relations dans ces réseaux, et capture magnifiquement l’inévitable conflit intérieur qui accompagne le retour au bercail.By Alexandra Boilard-Lefebvre. 2025
Une histoire silencieuse est l'aboutissement d'un attentif travail de mémoire au plus près des surgissements fantomatiques du passé, et la…
silhouette de Thérèse apparaît progressivement parmi les mots et les souvenirs, dans la scansion des voix et la blancheur des imagesBy Martina Chumova. 2024
Ce livre autofictif à fleur de peau compose une partition en quatre mouvements sur les expériences de la maternité, de…
la dépression et de la précarité chez une femme qui écrit. Talismans, icônes et retailles : Martina Chumova tisse réel et fictions, rêves et images de sa vie intérieure, et convoque une communauté d'écritures-soeurs pour creuser les mythes du foyer, de la famille, de la force et de la faiblesse. Je mets mes rêves sur la table s'affranchit des discours oppressifs liés à l'identité et à la migration, et rejoint une existence en évolution constante, renouant avec les possibilités qui sommeillent en nousBy Sarah Bernstein. 2025
Une femme s'installe dans un pays nordique, d'où ses ancêtres ont été chassés, afin de s'occuper de son frère récemment…
divorcé et de sa maison. Autour de ce vaste manoir, la campagne est le théâtre d'événements inexplicables affectant les animaux de ferme. Misant sur sa dévotion et sur son obéissance pour se faire accepter des villageois, la jeune femme découvre bientôt que ses gestes ont l'effet inverse. Tandis que la suspicion dont elle fait l'objet se transforme en hostilité, l'héroïne de ce roman déroutant et hypnotique est plongée dans des rapports de force où pouvoir, soumission, histoire et violence s'opposentBy Benjamin Hertwig. 2024
Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own…
family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic. After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan — to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered. Drawn from the author's experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man's journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recoveryBy Martina Chumova. 2024
Ce livre autofictif à fleur de peau compose une partition en quatre mouvements sur les expériences de la maternité, de…
la dépression et de la précarité chez une femme qui écrit. Talismans, icônes et retailles : Martina Chumova tisse réel et fictions, rêves et images de sa vie intérieure, et convoque une communauté d'écritures-soeurs pour creuser les mythes du foyer, de la famille, de la force et de la faiblesse. Je mets mes rêves sur la table s'affranchit des discours oppressifs liés à l'identité et à la migration, et rejoint une existence en évolution constante, renouant avec les possibilités qui sommeillent en nousBy Fawn Parker. 2024
One of Indigo&’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC&’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024…
Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know.Shortly after her mother&’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother&’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother&’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother&’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.In Hi, It&’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It&’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?By Deborah Ellis. 2024
What can you do when the adult world lets you down? Suspended from school and prone to rages, twelve-year-old Kate…
finds her own way to get on with her life, despite the messed-up adults around her. Her gran, for one, is stubborn and aloof — not unlike Kate herself, who has no friends, and who’s been expelled for “behavioral issues,” like the meltdowns she has had ever since her mom dumped her with her grandmother three years ago. Kate dreams that one day her mother will return for her. When that happens, they’ll need money, so Kate sets out to make some. Gran nixes her idea to sell psychiatric advice like Lucy in Peanuts (“You’re not a psychiatrist. You’ll get sued.”), so Kate decides to open a philosophy booth to provide answers to life’s big and small questions. She soon learns that adults have plenty of problems and secrets of their own, including Gran. When she finds that her grandmother has been lying to her about her mother, the two have a huge fight, and Gran says she can’t wait for Kate to finish high school so she’ll be rid of her at last. Kate decides to take matters into her own hands and discovers that to get what she wants, she may have to reach out to some unexpected people, and find a way to lay down her own anger. Key Text Features quotations dialogue literary references signs Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.5 Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot.By Maria Reva. 2025
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country&’s snail species from the brink of extinction. One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country&’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.