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Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel
By Rivka Galchen. 2021
The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric DisturbancesIt is 1618 in the German…
duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading, the Thirty Years’ War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler, an illiterate widow, is accused of being a witch.Katharina is known for her herbal remedies and the success of her children. Her eldest, Johannes, is the Imperial Mathematician and the renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone envious, and Katharina has done herself no favours by going out and about and being in everyone’s business.So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of making her ill by offering her a bitter, witchy drink, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and neighbour Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humour and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a family and a society undone by superstition, the state and the mortal convulsions of history.Looking for Jane: A Novel
By Heather Marshall. 2022
For readers of Joanna Goodman and Genevieve Graham comes a masterful debut novel about three women whose lives are bound…
together by a long-lost letter, a mother’s love, and a secret network of women fighting for the right to choose—inspired by true stories.Tell them you’re looking for Jane. 2017 When Angela Creighton discovers a mysterious letter containing a life-shattering confession in a stack of forgotten mail, she is determined to find the intended recipient. Her search takes her back to the 1970s when a group of daring women operated an illegal underground abortion network in Toronto known only by its whispered code name: Jane... 1971 As a teenager, Dr. Evelyn Taylor was sent to a home for “fallen” women where she was forced to give up her baby for adoption—a trauma she has never recovered from. Despite harrowing police raids and the constant threat of arrest, she joins the Jane Network as an abortion provider, determined to give other women the choice she never had. 1980 After discovering a shocking secret about her family history, twenty-year-old Nancy Mitchell begins to question everything she has ever known. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she feels like she has no one to turn to for help. Grappling with her decision, she locates “Jane” and finds a place of her own alongside Dr. Taylor within the network’s ranks, but she can never escape the lies that haunt her. Weaving together the lives of three women, Looking for Jane is an unforgettable debut about the devastating consequences that come from a lack of choice—and the enduring power of a mother’s love.Bluebird: A Novel
By Genevieve Graham. 2022
A dazzling novel set during the Great War and postwar Prohibition about a young nurse, a soldier, and a family…
secret that binds them together for generations to come—from USA TODAY and repeat #1 bestselling author Genevieve Graham.Present day Cassie Simmons, a museum curator, is enthusiastic about solving mysteries from the past, and she has a personal interest in the history of the rumrunners who ferried illegal booze across the Detroit River during Prohibition. So when a cache of whisky labeled Bailey Brothers’ Best is unearthed during a local home renovation, Cassie hopes to find the answers she’s been searching for about the legendary family of bootleggers... 1918 Corporal Jeremiah Bailey of the 1st Canadian Tunnelling Company is tasked with planting mines in the tunnels beneath enemy trenches. After Jerry is badly wounded in an explosion, he finds himself in a Belgium field hospital under the care of Adele Savard, one of Canada’s nursing sisters, nicknamed “Bluebirds” for their blue gowns and white caps. As Jerry recovers, he forms a strong connection with Adele, who is from a place near his hometown of Windsor, along the Detroit River. In the midst of war, she’s a welcome reminder of home, and when Jerry is sent back to the front, he can only hope that he’ll see his bluebird again. By war’s end, both Jerry and Adele return home to Windsor, scarred by the horrors of what they endured overseas. When they cross paths one day, they have a chance to start over. But the city is in the grip of Prohibition, which brings exciting opportunities as well as new dangerous conflicts that threaten to destroy everything they have fought for. Pulled from the pages of history, Bluebird is a compelling, luminous novel about the strength of the human spirit and the power of love to call us home.Swimming Back to Trout River: A Novel
By Linda Rui Feng. 2021
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE A lyrical novel set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution that follows…
a father’s quest to reunite his family before his precocious daughter’s momentous birthday, which Garth Greenwell calls “one of the most beautiful debuts I’ve read in years.”How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves? In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future. What Junie doesn’t know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three members of the family before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light. “A beautifully written, poignant exploration of family, art, culture, immigration, and most of all, love,” (Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee) Swimming Back to Trout River weaves together the stories of Junie, Momo, Cassia, and Dawn—a talented violinist from Momo’s past—while depicting their heartbreak and resilience, tenderly revealing the hope, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants.The Sound of Fire
By Renée Belliveau. 2021
A breathtaking, fast-paced work of historical fiction based on the tragic true story of the 1941 Mount Allison University residence…
fire.I have a history here. I am part of this landscape. I have forged it, shaped it, and renewed it time and again. At times, I have been a mishap. Once or twice, I was brought forth at the hands of mischief. This time, I was sparked to life. I awoke from the elements, timid and trembling. In the basement of a residence at a small liberal arts university in rural New Brunswick, while war rages overseas, a fire breaks out in the middle of the night. The town is sleeping. A novel of devastating beauty, based on the true story of the December 1941 fire that destroyed a men's residence at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, killing four students, and bringing the horrors of war startlingly close to home. Told at a blistering pace and in multiple points of view – including characters based on Alex and Rhoda Colville, who were students at the time, as well as faculty and staff, students past and present, a local journalist, and suspicious townspeople – this stunning work of historical fiction explores themes of trauma, love, and humanity in the face of tragedy.Urchin
By Kate Story. 2021
Disguised as a boy, Dor volunteers to work with Guiglielmo Marconi on his wireless radio experiments in St. John's, Newfoundland.…
But forces beyond nature are also at play, and Dor may have to sabotage Marconi's efforts in order to save her mother from the fairies who have kidnapped her.La butte à Pétard
By Diane Carmel Léger, Réjean Roy. 2020
Paper Houses
By Dominique Fortier. 2019
A whimsical and misanthropic imagining of Emily Dickinson's life Paper Houses is a novelized account of Emily Dickinson's life, focusing…
on her childhood, the homes she lived in throughout her life, her family relationships, and her gradual reclusiveness, as she becomes consumed by getting words down on paper, and writing becomes an end in itself. Dickinson's childhood seems idyllic, and the headstrong Emily is both serious and fanciful. As she presses flowers between the pages of heavy books to preserve them, she reflects that books drink the water of flowers. When she is given a kaleidoscope for Christmas, she sees it as a device for taking the world as it is and making it unrecognizable, saying to her mother in response to the gift, "But I already have so many books..." The account of her adult life focuses on her writing and gardening, her gradual withdrawal from society, her relationships with family members and her limited contact with people from the outside world. She is disappointed with flesh and blood, and prefers letters, reflecting that you can't have books and a life, after seeing her classmates abandon their dreams to take their place in society. She remains close to her sister, but upon returning to her childhood home Homestead, after a 25-year absence, she reflects that of all the members of her family, she likes the house the best.Hotline
By Dimitri Nasrallah. 2022
A vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman's struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.It's 1986, and Muna…
Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she's Mona, and she's quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives-marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients' deepest secrets.Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era's systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.Fayne: A Novel
By Ann-Marie MacDonald. 2022
THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERA beloved writer returns with a tale of science, magyk, love and identity.In the late nineteenth…
century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland, where she has been kept from the world by her adoring father, Lord Henry Bell, owing to a mysterious condition. Charlotte, strong and insatiably curious, revels in the moorlands, and has learned the treacherous and healing ways of the bog from the old hired man, Byrn, whose own origins are shrouded in mystery. Her idyllic existence is shadowed by the magnificent portrait on the landing in Fayne House which depicts her mother, a beautiful Irish-American heiress, holding Charlotte’s brother, Charles Bell. Charlotte has grown up with the knowledge that her mother died in giving birth to her, and that her older brother, Charles, the long-awaited heir, died soon afterwards at the age of two. When Charlotte’s appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter “as you would my son, had I one.” But when Charlotte and her tutor’s explorations of the bog turn up an unexpected artefact, her father announces he has arranged for her to be cured of her condition, and her world is upended. Charlotte’s passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets and to the heart of her own identity.Finding Edward
By Sheila Murray. 2022
Cyril Rowntree migrates to Toronto from Jamaica in 2012. Managing a precarious balance of work and university he begins to…
navigate his way through the implications of being racialized in his challenging new land. A chance encounter with a panhandler named Patricia leads Cyril to a suitcase full of photographs and letters dating back to the early 1920s. Cyril is drawn into the letters and their story of a white mother’s struggle with the need to give up her mixed race baby, Edward. Abandoned by his own white father as a small child, Cyril’s keen intuition triggers a strong connection and he begins to look for the rest of Edward’s story. As he searches, Cyril unearths fragments of Edward’s itinerant life as he crisscrossed the country. Along the way, he discovers hidden pieces of Canada’s Black history and gains the confidence to take on his new world."Les gravats jonchent la rue et si Anneliese frappe ceux-ci du bout de ses pieds, des femmes continuent de ramasser…
ces morceaux de bâtiments. En compagnie de son frère Peter, elle cherche un endroit où ils pourront recevoir de la nourriture, mais se retrouve plutôt dans une pièce où toutes sortes de livres sont exposés. Comme la salle ferme ses portes pour la nuit, ils y retournent le lendemain afin d'entendre l'histoire lue par une dame. Cette dernière leur présente également d'autres récits qui rappellent aux enfants leur propre réalité, comme celui du taureau Ferdinand, qui refuse de suivre les ordres, alors que leur père a été tué pour avoir résisté. Redécouvrant les rêves qui se sont envolés depuis le début de la guerre, Annaliese et Peter songent à contribuer aux efforts de leur ville pour retrouver leur vie d'avant."--[SDMWe Measure the Earth with Our Bodies: A Novel
By Tsering Yangzom Lama. 2022
A haunting first novel that recounts a Tibetan family’s fifty-year journey through exile and their struggles to forge new lives…
of dignity, love, and hope.A New York Times Book Review Summer Read PickA Washington Post Noteworthy Book of the MonthOne of Booklist's Top 10 Historical Fiction DebutsOne of Publishers Weekly's Writers to WatchA Most Anticipated Book - The Millions * Ms. Magazine * BustleLonglisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Toronto Book Awards.In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp on the border of Nepal, having survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas into exile when so many others did not. As Lhamo—haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, the village oracle—tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint, a relic long rumoured to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector’s vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams. Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles.Jardin de mots: Une histoire de Lire et faire lire
By Marie Cadieux. 2019
Autrefois, Madame Pauline adorait lire, et se lançait à coeur déployé dans les jardins de mots, où elle se promenait…
au milieu des trésors, déesses et dinosaures. Mais le temps passe et Madame Pauline n’a plus le coeur à se promener toute seule. À quoi bon cueillir une fleur s’il n’y a personne avec qui la sentir ? C’est sans compter le jardinier de mots et ses iles pleines de chevaliers, chocolat et de pyjamas, qui va traverser l’océan pour partager ses trésors. La petite graine d’espoir, ratatinée dans le manteau de Madame Pauline, va-t-elle fleurir à nouveau à la rencontre de ce jardinier ?War Stories
By Gordon Korman. 2020
A story of telling truth from lies - and finding out what being a hero really means.There are two things…
Trevor loves more than anything else: playing war-based video games and his great-grandfather Jacob, who is a true-blue, bona fide war hero. At the height of the war, Jacob helped liberate a small French village, and was given a hero's welcome upon his return to America.Now it's decades later, and Jacob wants to retrace the steps he took during the war - from training to invasion to the village he is said to have saved. Trevor thinks this is the coolest idea ever. But as they get to the village, Trevor discovers there's more to the story than what he's heard his whole life, causing him to wonder about his great-grandfather's heroism, the truth about the battle he fought, and importance of genuine valor.The Sleeping Car Porter
By Suzette Mayr. 2022
Longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter,…
must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.” On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. "Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time—train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929—and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the time—and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets." – Keith Mosman, Powell's Books "I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles of being black and gay at that time while not being too heavy handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental math on how many demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter." – Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale BooksLearned By Heart: A Novel
By Emma Donoghue. 2023
A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love…
at boarding school in nineteenth century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.Mi’kmaw Moons: The Seasons in Mi'kma'ki
By Cathy LeBlanc, David Chapman. 2022
Greenwood: A Novel
By Michael Christie. 2019
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEA CBC BOOKS "BEST CANADIAN FICTION" TITLE OF THE YEARNATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom the award-winning author…
of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.They come for the trees. It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and rapacious timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie's effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. Transporting, beautifully written, and brilliantly structured like the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood reveals the knot of lies, omissions, and half-truths that exists at the root of every family's origin story. It is a magnificent novel of greed, sacrifice, love, and the ties that bind--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.Alphabetical Diaries
By Sheila Heti. 2024
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them…
alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.