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Showing 1 - 20 of 84 items
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Politics and government, Journals and memoirs
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"From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the…
heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"
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Serious and literary fiction, Mysteries and crime stories, General fiction
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"From Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Szalay, a stunning and visceral portrait of a life full of attraction, desire, strength, fragility,…
and hurt. István grows up alone with his mother in a small town in Hungary. He is hard to know, uncommunicative and defined, mostly, by what happens to him. He seems to go along with whatever comes his way, and a lot does come his way, some of it in unmanageable doses: sex, prison, the army, some lowly jobs that take him from Hungary to London. It's here that a chance encounter changes his course completely. Leaving his modest beginnings behind, he suddenly finds himself among the super-rich. But just as he is slowly feeling comfortable in this new environment, the precarious edifice starts crumbling beneath him, until finally it comes crashing down altogether. In Flesh, Szalay has conjured a character who is unknowable and blunt, yet fully realized and somehow incredibly loveable. This is a story of a life, about a body in the world, and an epic tale of one man's unpredictable rise and inevitable downfall."
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Family stories, Multi-cultural fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction
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"A noirish page-turner about a mysterious disappearance and a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian family navigating insecurities, expectations, and simmering…
anger in their small BC town. Casper Han grew up the dutiful son of immigrants who never felt entirely welcome in their remote corner of British Columbia. Now an adult, living in Vancouver with a boyfriend whose white privilege he quietly resents, Casper rarely returns to his hometown, the site of a grief his family doesn't discuss: the loss of his identical twin, Sam. Over twenty years have passed since Sam went missing, and a pressing crisis has brought Casper and his siblings back. Their father has vanished, only to be found wandering the vast woods beyond the family home, confused and showing signs of memory loss. In order to move forward, the Han family, accustomed to fleeing their problems and accepting the hand dealt to them, must stay put and finally confront the past--untangling the mystery of what really happened the night of Sam's disappearance, and how the town failed them in the aftermath of it."
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Politics and government, Canadian non-fiction, Canadian history
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Since Confederation, Canadian prime ministers have consciously constructed the national story. Each created shared narratives, formulating and reformulating a series…
of unifying national ideas that served to keep this geographically large, ethnically diverse, and regionalized nation together. This book is about those narratives and stories. Focusing on the post–Second World War period, Raymond B. Blake shows how, regardless of political stripe, prime ministers worked to build national unity, forged a citizenship based on inclusion, and defined a place for Canada in the world. They created for citizens an ideal image of what the nation stood for and the path it should follow. They told a national story of Canada as a modern, progressive, liberal state with a strong commitment to inclusion, a deep respect for diversity and difference, and a fundamental belief in universal rights and freedoms. Ultimately, this innovative history provides readers with a new way to see and understand what Canada is, and what holds us together as a nation
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Arts and entertainment, Humour, Actors biography, Fine arts biography, Canadian authors (Non-fiction)
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From the bestselling author of Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy, the definitive biography of John Candy—a heartwarming portrait…
of one of comedy's most beloved and enduring stars. From his humble beginnings in sketch comedy with the Toronto branch of Second City, to his rise to fame in SCTV and Hollywood film classics like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Great Outdoors, and Uncle Buck, John Candy captivated audiences with his self-deprecating humour, emotional warmth, and gift for improvisation. Now, for the first time since Candy's tragic death, bestselling biographer Paul Myers tells the full story of the man behind the laughs. Drawing on extensive research and exclusive interviews with many of Candy's closest friends and colleagues, including Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, Steve Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and many more, John Candy: A Life in Comedy celebrates the comedian's unparalleled talent, infectious charm, and generosity of spirit. Through ups and downs, successes and failures, and struggles with anxiety and self-doubt, Candy faced the world with a big smile and a warm demeanour that earned him the love and adoration of fans around the world
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Short stories, Serious and literary fiction
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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
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Women sleuths, Mysteries and crime stories
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When her grown daughter is suspected of murder, a charming and tenacious widow digs into the case to unmask the…
real killer in this twisty, page-turning whodunnit-the first book in a cozy new detective series from the acclaimed author of Ayesha at Last. After her husband's unexpected death eighteen months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she'd receive another phone call as heartbreaking-until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she's been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years. Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana's landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes which have gone unsolved. And the facts of the case are troubling: Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged in his chest. And Kausar-a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by her years-senses there's more to the story than her daughter is telling. With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar can't predict the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way?
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Science fiction, Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
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READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award…
finalist and a &“maestra of literary fiction&” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman&’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA&’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
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Science and technology
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"Vaclav Smil is my favorite author."—Bill GatesAn indispensable analysis of how the world really produces and consumes its food—and a…
scientist's exploration of how we can successfully feed a growing population without killing the planetWe have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. As a result, in our economic, political, and everyday choices, we take for granted and fail to prioritize the thing that makes all our lives possible: food.In this ambitious, myth-busting book, Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today: why are some of the world&’s biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why do we waste so much food and how can we solve that? Could the whole planet go vegan and be healthy? Should it? He explores the global history of food production to understand why we farm some animals and not others, why most of the world&’s calories come from just a few foodstuffs, and how this might change in the future.How to Feed the World is the data-based, rigorously researched guide that offers solutions to our broken global food system.
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Environment, Science and technology
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The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal…
the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet&’s future. Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He&’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world. Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries. Shubin retraces his steps on a &“dinosaur dance floor,&” showing us where these beasts had populated the once tropical lands at the poles. He takes readers meteor hunting, as meteorites preserved in the ice can be older than our planet and can tell us about our galaxy&’s formation. Readers also encounter insects and fish that develop their own anti-freeze, and aquatic life in ancient lakes hidden miles under the ice that haven&’t seen the surface in centuries. It turns out that explorers and scientists have found these extreme environments as prime ground for making scientific breakthroughs across a vast range of knowledge. Shubin shares unforgettable moments from centuries of expeditions to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—the ends of the earth offer profound stories that will forever change our view of life and the entire planet.
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Journals and memoirs, Social issues
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"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review"An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her…
churchyardThe housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.
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Laws and statutes, Environment
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From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book, which answers a resounding "yes" to the…
question of its title.At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.Is A River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.
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Journals and memoirs, Disabilities
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A humorous, profound debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood, by an acclaimed essayist and cartoonist.In 2021, Gabrielle…
Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands. It only worsened over time, and as a writer and artist, she had to learn new ways of creating and expressing herself. The experience completely changed her life and her outlook. Look Ma, No Hands explores both the difficulty and the humour of developing chronic and life-altering pain in her twenties. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of her life touched by her disability: how she learned to write when she couldn&’t type; how she learned to manage the most mundane daily tasks. She moves cities and as her work as a writer and cartoonist builds has to navigate different byzantine health systems without the privilege or security of having a family doctor, even as she moves into her new apartment and embarks on first dates. And she does all of this with the most wonderful sense of the absurd. Look Ma, No Hands is utterly charming and shares profound reflections on life&’s curveballs, and explores how, in Drolet&’s words, &“you can live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body.&”
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Fantasy, Ghost and horror stories
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In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a…
vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice.A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed confessions by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shared the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits, this is a bloody history of the American West that has remained untold until now.
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Medicine, Science and technology, General non-fiction
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John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a…
deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. “This highly readable call to action could not be more timely.” –Kirkus, starred review. “Memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion.” –Bookpage, starred review. Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. New York Times Bestseller
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fiction
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In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global…
change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
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Customs and cultures, Lifestyle, General non-fiction
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From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and…
girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences. An urgent read that addresses questions around the current regression of feminism.When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement&’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and &“riot grrrl&” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria&’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren&’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period&’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture&’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amidst a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.
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Literature biography, Journals and memoirs, Women biography
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“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex…
living entity that is the world." —Nobel Prize-winner Olga TokarczukWhere do we belong if we don’t fit in?A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than MeSusan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, Big Girls Don’t Cry invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.
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Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
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Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Gabriela Cabezón Camara’s new novel finds glimmers of hope for the future in the…
brutal history of colonial Latin America Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he's become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and conquistador; he has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement, and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis, which just might save the new world from extinction… Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire and a historical novel that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny, and the treatment of women and indigenous people. It is a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center, finding in the rainforest a magical, surreal space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.
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Serious and literary fiction, Suspense and thrillers
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A pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder, from the New York Times bestselling author of Two Nights in…
Lisbon and The Expats.Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite.Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he’s just not that useful to anyone any more.Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia’s bowels, the building’s almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city.As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight’s shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he’ll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there’s more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone’s aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost.