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Showing 1 - 8 of 8 items
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Serious and literary fiction, Multi-cultural fiction
Human-narrated audio
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were…
school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Humourous fiction, Serious and literary fiction, Family stories
Human-narrated audio
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 Less
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Humourous fiction, Ghost and horror stories, Serious and literary fiction
Human-narrated audio
With biting wit, Aurora Stewart de Peña satirizes the creative industry she’s spent years in. From the people who brought…
you the invention of advertising comes Julius Julius, a rambling architectural wonder, outpost of the very first ad man of ancient Pompeii, built on the backs of generations of creative survivors who just want to lie on the floor of a conference room and cry about the lumber account without being sexually harassed.Welcome to the world’s oldest advertising agency, where ghosts control the board room AC, an ancient executive assistant runs a cave full of thousand year old billboards, and there are bones in the walls.In a trio of voices from different time periods, we move through the mythical Agency, interrogating the process of stoking desire for a living. We meet the Senior Brand Anthropologist, who’s being surprised by dirty bars of Irish Spring she can’t remember buying, the Creative Director, whose ascent involved an ad campaign starring his dead best friend, and the Account Supervisor, whose only crime is not being a genius. (But the Fisherman Jack Tuna Campaign was her idea, despite what it says on the awards submissions.) Stewart de Peña’s debut novel reveals the cracks in the veneer of the creative industries, and the crisis of consciousness underneath in a novel full of compassion, humour, and blonde sausage dogs.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Short stories
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
With an intimate, comic, and compassionate eye, the twelve stories in Simple Creatures consider what it means to live with…
less in the twenty-first century.In this debut collection, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories taking the form of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, or the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed with a famous Canadian writer, Simple Creatures also shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves.We meet a teenager who wants to live among a community of Bigfoot that he claims to have discovered in the woods; the widow of a famous endocrinologist after she gains custody of a chimpanzee from his lab; a boy whose fledgling hockey career is troubled by the fact that his name is Leo Gretzky; and a divorcee seeking out the mysterious author of a viral environmental pledge. Through their lives, Simple Creatures offers an acute, sympathetic portrait of our time.“Here are people struggling with simple needs and small dramas that nevertheless got entirely under my skin – sublime awe, tender longing, painful anxiety, too. Robert McGill’s masterful Simple Creatures reminded me of how potent an elixir the short story form can be – the magic of words alchemically transforming within me into raw feeling. The stories in Simple Creatures truly live and breathe.” – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Wait Softly Brother"Robert McGill writes hilarious, smart, heart-breaking stories. A master of voice and dialogue, character and perspective, he knows everyone’s loneliness. We’re all in here, the whole arc of life: children in the beginning, elderly athletes battling to the end, and middle aged lovers trying to love in the middle of the internet and a climate disaster. Come watch as one of our best stylists plies his trade, pushing short fiction to its contemporary, ecstatic edge." – Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting and Animal Person
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Multi-cultural fiction, Serious and literary fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were…
school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Family stories, Serious and literary fiction, Humourous fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
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.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Ghost and horror stories, Serious and literary fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
With biting wit, Aurora Stewart de Peña satirizes the creative industry she&’s spent years in. From the people who brought…
you the invention of advertising comes Julius Julius, a rambling architectural wonder, outpost of the very first ad man of ancient Pompeii, built on the backs of generations of creative survivors who just want to lie on the floor of a conference room and cry about the lumber account without being sexually harassed.Welcome to the world&’s oldest advertising agency, where ghosts control the board room AC, an ancient executive assistant runs a cave full of thousand year old billboards, and there are bones in the walls.In a trio of voices from different time periods, we move through the mythical Agency, interrogating the process of stoking desire for a living. We meet the Senior Brand Anthropologist, who&’s being surprised by dirty bars of Irish Spring she can&’t remember buying, the Creative Director, whose ascent involved an ad campaign starring his dead best friend, and the Account Supervisor, whose only crime is not being a genius. (But the Fisherman Jack Tuna Campaign was her idea, despite what it says on the awards submissions.) Stewart de Peña&’s debut novel reveals the cracks in the veneer of the creative industries, and the crisis of consciousness underneath in a novel full of compassion, humour, and blonde sausage dogs.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Serious and literary fiction, Short stories
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
The first collection of short stories from award-winning author Tim Bowling, exploring childhood, work, and aging. Set on the west…
coast of British Columbia and in Edmonton, the fifteen stories in this collection focus on moments of transformation: between parents and their children, between men and women, between humans and the natural world. In this collection that’s every bit as thoughtful and masterful as his past work, Tim Bowling explores the passing of time and the (sometimes desperate) desire for meaning to return, with depth and flashes of humour.