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Showing 1 - 20 of 35 items
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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
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General fiction, Multi-cultural fiction, Disabilities fiction, Canadian authors (Fiction)
Human-narrated audio
An engaging YA novel about a girl in treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder that combats the dehumanizing stigma around mental…
illness Sixteen-year-old Mira Durand has just been checked into the secure unit of the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. Four years of being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato have only worsened her OCD and anorexia. Her brutal, religious compulsions, which she believes keep her mom safe, make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. No wonder her only friend is her journal. At the Residency's Ward 2, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviours to tolerate hers. The complex friendships she forms with them (including a first love), the slow trust she builds with her treatment team, and the outside and family visits she earns give her things to look forward to beyond the drudgery of her compulsions. But it takes visiting Gung Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions. Based on the author's personal experience, A Drop in the Ocean is a gritty, humanizing portrait of living with mental illness
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Journals and memoirs, Medicine, Law and crime
Human-narrated audio
Part memoir, part manifesto, Crackdown is a story of the drug war, told from the frontlines.Garth Mullins was born into…
a world too bright for him to fully see, and too unforgiving to fully accept him. Bullied by both kids and adults, who mocked his albinism and trivialized his blindness, Garth turned to activism and punk rock, seeking escape, and discovered a scene that embraced him for who he was. And yet he still couldn't quell a haunting pain that had overwhelmed him since he was a child, a deep need to "blank it all out." Until he tried heroin.Garth's experience as a heroin user—including dopesickness, incarceration and overdose—is an all-too-common story for those struggling with drug addiction. And for Garth, it was this revelation that propelled him to the forefront of drug user activism. He was witnessing firsthand the failure of abstinence-based recovery programs; the ceaseless deaths of friends and community members from unregulated, toxic drug supply and a lack of safer alternatives; the over-representation of drug users, particularly Indigenous and Black users, in jails and prisons. And he saw that far from the decades-long war on drugs being a success, it had been a deadly failure. Crackdown is an intimate portrait of Garth's relationship with opioids, and a searing indictment of a broken system that is failing drug users and non-users alike. With street drugs getting more toxic by the day, drug users and their families, friends and communities are left to pay the price. Crackdown asks us to radically reimagine our approach to drug use, and to envisage a system that helps rather than harms.
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Indigenous peoples in Canada fictionArts and entertainment, Indigenous peoples, Anthologies
Human-narrated audio
Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and…
art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond. Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of "all my relations." Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly
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Biography, Customs and cultures, Social issues, Canadian authors (Non-fiction)
Human-narrated audio
The life and legacy of Serafim "Joe" Fortes, a trailblazing Black lifeguard, who became a cultural icon in a racist…
society Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver's first lifeguard, Serafim "Joe" Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man. In Searching for Serafim , author Ruby Smith Díaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes's publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research. The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. Searching for Serafim conjures a new side to one of Vancouver's most beloved — and misunderstood — public figures
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Customs and cultures, Biography, Canadian authors (Non-fiction)
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Serafim "Joe" Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on…
the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning as the city's first lifeguard, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a postage stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man. In Searching for Serafim, author Ruby Smith Díaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes's publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research. The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. With black-and-white photos
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General fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction
Human-narrated audio
Perfect for fans of Mason Deaver and Becky Albertalli, this tender, raucous novel follows a rule-following, perfectionist teen who starts…
an underground GSA club at her conservative Catholic high school, from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens. Cassie Perera is a star student in St. Luke's junior class. But the new school year brings an unwelcome surprise—the return to St. Luke's of Cassie's former friend, Ben, who left a few years ago after a homophobic bullying incident Cassie knows she didn't do enough to prevent. Still harboring guilt from her inaction, Cassie decides, in her usual, overzealous way, to team up with the neighboring public school to found an underground Gender and Sexuality Alliance—as a complicated strategy for making things up to Ben. Secretly, Cassie is also tempted by the possibility of opening up about her own sexuality for the first time. As Cassie's new friends urge her out of her comfort zone, she unlocks a kind of joy and freedom she's never felt before—even as she struggles to balance these experiences with her typical tightrope of being the perfect daughter, student, and Catholic. Cassie's perfectly curated life unravels into turmoil, but can she embrace the mess enough to piece together something new?
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Indigenous peoples in Canada, Indigenous peoples biography, Indigenous peoples history
Human-narrated audio
We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait…
of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, NoiseCat and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself. Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist. Told in the style of a "Coyote Story," a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional art form nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America's First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and a restoration—of Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as NoiseCat seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. A soulful, formally daring, and indelible work from an important new voice
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Serious and literary fiction, General fiction, Family stories
Human-narrated audio, Automated braille
In this stunning tale of love and loss, a middle-aged cartographer, suffering from memory loss and claustrophobia, hikes through the…
interior of British Columbia in search of a treehouse where he spent one memorable summer on the run with his four siblings. In Rufous and Calliope, Sarah Louise Butler takes readers deep into the rugged British Columbia Interior, where the mysteries of nature collide with the fragile threads of memory. Rufous Flanagan, a modern-day cartographer, embarks on a solo trek through an ancient mountain pass in search of the treehouse hideaway where he spent one memorable childhood summer on the run with his three older half-siblings and his twin sister, Calliope. With every step, the vast, untamed wilderness presents both a physical and emotional challenge, as Rufous must confront not only treacherous terrain, but the unravelling of his own mind. His memories-sometimes vivid, sometimes slipping away-become a map guiding him through towering forests, dry creek beds and smoke-filled skies. Yet, in this wilderness, not everything is as it seems. Echoes of the past lead Rufous on a journey that blurs the line between dream and reality. As the elements close in, this novel offers an unforgettable tale of survival, memory and the bond between siblings.
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Animal stories, Alphabet, number and picture books, Humourous fiction
Human-transcribed braille
In this humorous picture book, Heloise the penguin doesn't like huddling with her friends (it gives her the collywobbles), so…
she sets off to find others like her but discovers there's no place like home--especially when your friends support you.Available copies:
1
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General fiction, Indigenous peoples in Canada fiction
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It's the summer of 1989, and Mia is on her own—adjusting to life without her ex-best friend, Lara. Summer vacation…
starts off well enough as Mia binges MuchMusic and learns how to jar fish with her aunty and uncle. Then her grandma starts feeling unwell. At first, Mia isn't too worried, but when a call comes in from the clinic to say her grandmother has to go to the hospital in Vancouver, everyone realizes this is serious. Mia and her mom and aunties head to the city to be by her grandmother's side. Mia mostly ping-pongs from the hospital to the motel, but she also gets to see some of the city and eat (too much) takeout. She even joins a basketball camp at the Friendship Centre, where she meets a teen coach who inspires her to get back into the game she loves and delve deeper into what it means to be Indigenous. As time passes, Mia's grandmother's health doesn't improve, and she has to face the fact that her beloved grandma might not get better
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Indigenous peoples biography, Indigenous peoples in Canada
Human-narrated audio
It's taken most of Larry Grant's long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a…
hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status. With one stroke of the pen, they were disenfranchised—no longer recognized as Indigenous. Reconciling is a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman as they visit pivotal geographical places together. Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver and spans key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling , an ongoing, unfinished process we're all going through. "I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self," he explains. "To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that."
Printbraille
Alphabet, number and picture books, Canadian fiction, Indigenous peoples in Canada fiction, General fiction
Human-transcribed braille
From the bestselling and Governor General's Award–winning author of On the Trapline comes a beautifully told and comforting picture book…
about a boy's journey to overcome generational trauma of residential schools.Deep in the night, when James should be sleeping, he tosses and turns. He thinks about big questions, like why we don't feel dizzy when the Earth spins. He looks at the stars outside his bedroom and thinks about the Night Sky Stories his kōkom has told him. He imagines being a moshom himself. On nights like these, he follows the moonlit path to his mother's bedroom. They talk and they cuddle, and they fall asleep just like that. One day, James's kōkom takes him on a special walk with a big group of people. It's called a march, and it ends in front of a big pile of things: teddy bears, flowers, tobacco ties and little shoes. Kōkom tells him that this is a memorial in honor of Indigenous children who had gone to residential schools and boarding schools but didn't come home. He learns that his kōkom was taken away to one of these schools with her sister, who also didn't come home.That night, James can't sleep so he follows the moonlit path to his mother. She explains to James that at residential school when Kōkom felt alone, she had her sister to cuddle, just like they do. And James falls asleep gathered in his mother's arms.Includes an author note discussing the inspiration for the book.Available copies:
3
Printbraille
Alphabet, number and picture books, Family stories, General fictionHealth and medicine, Social issues, Family and relationships
Human-transcribed braille
A mother and son experiencing family violence have to flee their home, moving from place to place to find safe…
shelter, until finally they’re able to go back home again and make it the strongest house yet.Available copies:
0
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Biography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
A personal and historical story of identity, place, and belonging from a Musqueam-Chinese Elder caught between cultures. It's taken most…
of Larry Grant's long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status. With one stroke of the pen, they were disenfranchised—no longer recognized as Indigenous. Reconciling is a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman as they visit pivotal geographical places together, including the Musqueam reserve, Chinatown, the site of the Mission residential school, the Vancouver docks and the University of British Columbia. Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver and spans key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling , an ongoing, unfinished process we're all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. "I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self," he explains. "To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that."
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Mysteries and crime stories, Suspense and thrillers, General fiction
Human-narrated audio
Maggie Zito is being held for murder. The volatile single mother is accused of killing the retired leader of the…
notorious Exiles motorcycle gang and his wife aboard their million-dollar houseboat. With a mystery witness putting Maggie at the scene, and the Exiles baying for her blood, it's unlikely she'll make it to the trial alive. Desperate, Maggie's lawyer, Shuzhen Chen, calls in a favor to Dave Wakeland: Find evidence of Maggie's innocence and get her client out of custody. Wakeland reluctantly returns to a changing city, full of unfamiliar dangers. To prove Maggie's innocence, he and Shuzhen must reckon with the Exiles crime syndicate and their bloodthirsty leader. The bikers are on the verge of a civil war, and an unseen foe is gunning for the top spot. Dave and Shuzhen have to put aside their complicated past to learn the identity of the witness, and find out why Maggie was framed for this killing. To complicate matters, Wakeland's business partner is nowhere to be found. The security firm they started teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Even if the case can be solved, and the business saved, can the partners ever trust each other?
Electronic braille (Uncontracted), Braille (Uncontracted)
Indigenous peoples in Canada fiction, General fiction
Human-transcribed braille
In this follow-up middle-grade novel to Weird Rules to Follow, when Mia's beloved grandmother gets sick and is sent to…
a Vancouver hospital, Mia and her Mom and aunties travel to be by her side. But as she bounces between motel room, visiting hours and city adventures, Mia begins to realize that her grandmother might not get better.
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Canadian authors (Fiction), General fiction, Indigenous peoples in Canada fiction
Human-narrated audio
In this follow-up middle-grade novel to Weird Rules to Follow, when Mia's beloved grandmother gets sick and is sent to…
a Vancouver hospital, Mia and her Mom and aunties travel to be by her side. But as she bounces between motel room, visiting hours and city adventures, Mia begins to realize that her grandmother might not get better.
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Environment, Science and technology, Economics, Canadian authors (Non-fiction)
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An incendiary anti-capitalist response to climate change rooted in hope for the future, this book is a tool or a…
weapon, depending on how you use it Despite the naysayers, climate change is a fact. We know that global temperatures are rising, that weather patterns are changing, that forest fires, droughts, flooding, severe storms, and heat waves are the new normal. We know this planet is teetering on the edge of climate collapse, an apocalyptic event that threatens not only the future of human civilization, but also the millions of other unique life forms on Earth. We know it's all our fault-it's the direct result of human beings burning fossil fuels and spewing out carbon emissions at such a fantastic pace that we've changed the fate of the entire planet, and it leaves most of us feeling helpless. What can any of us really do? This Book Is a Knife is a startling essay collection that explores the origins and dangers of climate change through a critique of capitalism and an exploration of the ways in which we might radically reimagine our world before it's too late. Rooted in L.E. Fox's background as a science journalist, This Book Is a Knife is a frank, plain-spoken, and sharply incisive series of missives designed to wake us up to the urgent reality of climate change and the lies we are fed based on the fact that the real issue is neither climate nor the environment-it's capitalism. Fierce and unapologetic, This Book Is a Knife is a passionate and unique dissection of climate change that offers new possibilities for saving the world.
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Canadian authors (Fiction), Mysteries and crime stories, Humourous fiction
Human-narrated audio
Buddhist butler and reluctant investigator Helen Thorpe bands together with her fellow butler-school graduates to rescue her very wealthy employer…
and his son in this new mystery by bestselling author Susan Juby Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant. The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. Helen and her employer, Mr. Levine, have come to Side Island to assist David, his youngest son, who is facilitating the course. The motley assortment of participants includes a burned-out environmental activist, an internet troll, a clued-out consumerist, an alleged white nationalist, and a man who was arrested at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda. No rapprochement between the warring-or at least endlessly bickering-parties seems possible. But when something deadly happens, they must learn to work together. First, however, they must figure out who among them can be trusted.