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Skater Boy
By Anthony Nerada. 2024
In this YA pop punk debut about queer romance and destroying labels, a teen risks everything to write his own story.…
Perfect for fans of Sonora Reyes and Adib Khorram.Stonebridge High&’s resident bad boy, Wesley &“Big Mac&” Mackenzie, is failing senior year—thanks to his unchecked anger, rowdy friends, and a tendency to ditch his homework for skateboarding and a secret photography obsession. So when his mom drags him to a production of The Nutcracker, Wes isn&’t interested at all . . . until he sees Tristan Monroe. Mr. Nutcracker himself.Wes knows he shouldn&’t like Tristan; after all, he&’s a ballet dancer, and Wes is as closeted as they come. But when they start spending time together, Wes can&’t seem to get Tristan out of his head. Driven by a new sense of purpose, Wes begins to think that—despite every authority figure telling him otherwise—maybe he can change for the better and graduate on time.As a falling out with his friends becomes inevitable, Wes realizes that being himself means taking a stand—and blowing up the bad-boy reputation he never wanted in the first place.From a debut author to watch, Skater Boy delivers a heart-wrenching, validating, and honest story about what it means to be gay in a world where you don&’t fit in.
A Garden Called Home
By Jessica J. Lee. 2024
What makes the place we live feel like home? This is a warm-hearted and lush picture book about family, the immigrant…
experience and how a simple garden can foster a connection to the larger natural world.Mama was born in a country far away from here. I love her stories about warm rain in winter and green mountains. And now Mama's taking me there! When a young girl and her mother go to visit her family, the girl notices a change. At home, her mother mostly stays inside. Here, her mother likes to explore and go hiking. The girl has never seen her so happy! Her mother tells her about the trees, bushes, flowers and birds. Did you know that tree roots make mountains strong? And that ài hāo (mugwort) is used to make delicious, sweet dumplings?But her mother's smile goes away when they return home. It's cold and she doesn't want to go outside. She goes back to wearing her big quilted jackets and watering her houseplants.How can the girl show her mother that nature here can be wondrous too?Includes a glossary of plants with Mandarin/English words.
Last Woman: Stories
By Carleigh Baker. 2024
From one of the country&’s most celebrated new writers, a blistering collection of short fiction that is bracingly relevant, playfully…
irreverent, and absolutely unforgettable.There&’s a hole in the ozone layer. Are teenage girls to blame? Floods and wildfires, toxic culture, billionaires in outer space, or a purse-related disaster while on mushrooms—in today&’s hellscape world, there&’s no shortage of things to worry about. Last Woman, the new collection of short fiction by award-winning author Carleigh Baker, wants you to know that you&’re not alone. In these 13 brilliant new stories, Baker and her perfectly-drawn characters are here for you—in fact, they&’re just as worried and weirded-out as everyone else.A woman&’s dream of poetic solitude turns out to be a recipe for loneliness. A retiree is convinced that his silence is the only thing that will prevent a deadly sinkhole. An emerging academic wakes up and chooses institutional violence. A young woman finds sisterhood in a strange fertility ritual, and an enigmatic empath is on a cleanse. Baker&’s characters are both wildly misguided and a product of the misguided times in which we live. Through them we see our world askew and skewered—and, perhaps, we can begin to see it anew.Carleigh Baker&’s signature style is irreverent, but her heart is true—these stories delve into fear for the future, intergenerational misunderstandings, and the complexities of belonging with sharp wit and boundless empathy. With equal parts compassion and critique, she brings her clear-eyed attention to bear on our world, and the results are hilarious, heartbreaking, and startling in their freshness.
Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis
By Gregor Craigie. 2024
An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC Radio…
host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn&’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we&’re going to house ourselves and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution.
The Other Valley: A Novel
By Scott Alexander Howard. 2024
LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025 | Shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize For fans of Emily St. John Mandel,…
David Mitchell, and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exquisite literary speculative novel set in an unnamed valley, where bereaved residents can petition to cross a forbidden border to see their lost loved ones again.Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is an awkward, quiet girl, vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she&’ll decree who among the town&’s residents may be escorted deep into the woods, who may cross the border&’s barbed wire fence, who may make the arduous trek to descend into the next valley over. It&’s the same valley, the same town. But to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it&’s twenty years behind. The only border crossings permitted by the Conseil are mourning tours: furtive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive. When Odile recognizes two mourners she wasn&’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her classmate Edme have crossed the border from the future to see their son while he&’s still alive in Odile&’s present. Edme—who is brilliant and funny, and the only person to truly know Odile—is about to die. Sworn to secrecy by the Conseil so as not to disrupt the course of nature, Odile finds herself drawing closer to her doomed friend—imperiling her own future. Masterful and original, The Other Valley is an affecting modern fable about the inevitable march of time and whether or not fate can be defied. Above all, it is about love and letting go, and the bonds, in both life and death, that never break.
The Knowing
By Tanya Talaga. 2025
From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes a riveting exploration of her family’s…
story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
By Danny Ramadan. 2024
A queer Syrian refugee reckons with a life spent out of place.&“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.&” So begins this…
electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he&’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.Starting with his family&’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city&’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria&’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that&’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.
A Face Is a Poem
By Julie Morstad. 2024
Look through the one-of-a-kind eyes of acclaimed author/illustrator Julie Morstad and explore the beauty, diversity and wonder of faces all…
around.A face is a poem with all the parts put together, adding up to someone you love. Have you ever stopped and looked, really looked, at a face? Do faces stay the same forever, or do they change? What if we could change faces to see through someone else's eyes? What if eyelashes were butterflylashes?Julie Morstad guides readers through a playful and fantastical exploration of the unique eyes, noses, mouths, freckles, wrinkles, scars and all those one-of-a-kind marks that make up a face. Embracing commonalities and differences alike, A Face Is a Poem is an ode to the unique beauty of each and every person's appearance, with an empowering message of love.
Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation
By Murray Sinclair. 2024
Named a Book to Read This Fall by CBC Books and the Toronto Star • One of Indigo&’s Most Anticipated…
BooksJudge, senator, and activist. Father, grandfather, and friend. This is Murray Sinclair&’s story—and the story of a nation—in his own words, an oral history that forgoes the trappings of the traditionally written memoir to center Indigenous ways of knowledge and storytelling. As Canada moves forward into the future of Reconciliation, one of its greatest leaders guides us to ask the most important and difficult question we can ask of ourselves: Who are we?For decades, Senator Sinclair has fearlessly educated Canadians about the painful truths of our history. He was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba, and only the second Indigenous judge in Canadian history. He was the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and remains one of the foremost voices on Reconciliation. And now, for the first time, he shares his full story—and his full vision for our nation—with readers across Canada and beyond.Drawing on Senator Sinclair&’s perspectives regarding Indigenous identity, human rights, and justice, Who We Are examines the roles of history, resistance, and resilience in the pursuit of finding a path forward, one that heals the damaged relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. In doing so, it reveals Senator Sinclair&’s life in a new and direct way, exploring how all of these unique experiences have shaped him as an Anishinaabe man, father, and grandfather.Structured around the four questions that have long shaped Senator Sinclair&’s thinking and worldview—Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I?—Who We Are takes readers into the story of his remarkable life as never before, while challenging them to embrace an inclusive vision for our shared future.
May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers
By Minelle Mahtani. 2024
A searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice.Minelle Mahtani had…
taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she'd moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.Just as Minelle was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers.What does it mean to amplify the voices of others while the stories of your ancestors are being buried in your mother's mouth? Why do we cling to superstition and luck when we&’ve lost all faith in healing those we love? And how do we juggle bearing the burden of looking after an ill parent when we are trying to parent our own children?In exquisitely lyrical and inventive prose, Mahtani recounts the experience so many of us recognize: a life calibrated through calculating when to speak and when to be silent in a world that feels like it forces us to be broken.
Coexistence: Stories
By Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2024
A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature&’s most boundless minds.Across the prairies…
and Canada&’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They&’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt&’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.