Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 55 items
Saltsea
By David Helwig. 2006
A lovely, meditative novel, a story about memory, and about how what once was continues to affect what is and…
what will be. It is the story of a place -- a hotel on the shores of Prince Edward Island, of the family that used to own it, and the people who have been its caretakers.In the Field
By Claire Tacon. 2011
Ellie Lucan's about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She's got a…
doctorate, her husband's a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at a Montessori.When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her sons to spend the summer in her hometown. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons.As Ellie is drawn back into the community, the strain on her marriage intensifies and she is forced to decide where her loyalties lie.Clare Tacon has an MFA in writing from the University of British Columbia and is a past editor of Prism Magazine. In the Field is her first novel.Bit Rot
By Douglas Coupland. 2016
Bit Rot, a new collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being…
shredded, is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one."Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones." Bit Rot the book explores the ways humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.From the Hardcover edition.I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth
By Margaret Atwood. 2012
'"Time isn't the same in dreams," says Charis, who likes reading about what's going on in her head when she…
isn't awake, though sometimes, thinks Roz, it's hard to tell the difference. "In dreams, nobody's dead, really. That's what the man who...he says, in dreams the time is always Now."' Long ago, when they were all a lot younger, Zenia stole a man from each of them. Then she died. Now she's come back. Or has she? There's a lot more than one kind of ghost. Margaret Atwood revisits her classic characters from The Robber Bride. This story first appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Walrus magazine.The Street: A Novel
By Ann Petry. 1998
THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to…
raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao
By Martha Batalha. 2017
'Zesty' Daily Mail 'A real gem of a book' Stylist A wickedly funny tale of two rebellious sisters in 1940s…
Rio de Janeiro Euridice is bright and ambitious. But this is Brazil in the 1940s, and society expects her to be a loving wife and mother. While Antenor is busy congratulating himself on his excellent catch, Euridice spends her humdrum days ironing his shirts and removing the lumps of onion from his food, dreaming of the success she could have made of herself – as a writer, dressmaker or culinary whizz – in another life. Her free-spirited sister Guida, on the other hand, is the kind of person who was 'born knowing everything'. When she returns from her failed elopement with stories of heartbreak and loss, the lives of Euridice and her husband are thrown into confusion, with disastrous consequences. The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is a darkly comic debut, bursting with vibrant Brazilian spirit and unforgettable characters – a jubilant novel about the emancipation of women.His Whole Life
By Elizabeth Hay. 2015
Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly…
intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home.At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country, summer to winter, wellbeing to illness, the novel charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family comes apart.Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec is on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming of age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. It draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of one family and those closest to it. Hay explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers.To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story
By Alistair Macleod. 2004
The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things…
were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.Alone in the Classroom
By Elizabeth Hay. 2011
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing…
them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.Away
By Jane Urquhart. 1993
A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family's complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds…
with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.The Stone Carvers
By Jane Urquhart. 2001
Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The…
Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward's ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.The Weekend: The international bestseller, shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2020
By Charlotte Wood. 2020
A #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER One of The Times books of the year: 'Ripples with wit, insight and vitality' 'The Weekend…
is so great I am struggling to find the words to do it justice... Wood is an agonisingly gifted writer: I am now going to read all her other books!'Marian Keyes'It was refreshing to encounter a novel that so profoundly sympathises with women on the forbidding cusp of being classified as "elderly". Wood ably conveys that older women didn't used to be old, and that the experience of ageing is universally bewildering'Lionel Shriver (Observer, Books of the year) 'Riveting' Elizabeth Day 'A perfect, funny, insightful, novel about women, friendship, and ageing. I loved it'Nina Stibbe 'Authentic, funny, brutally well-observed... As with the novels of Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler, these are characters not written to please, but to feel true'The Sunday Times 'Glorious... Charlotte Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout' Guardian'The Weekend triumphantly brings to life the honest, inner lives of women' Independent'A lovely, lively, intelligent, funny book' Tessa Hadley 'One sharp, funny, heartbreaking and gorgeously-written package. I loved it' Paula Hawkins'One of those deceptively compact novels that continues to open doors in your mind long after the last page' Patrick GaleSylvie, Jude, Wendy and Adele have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three.These women couldn't be more different: Jude, a once-famous restaurateur with a spotless life and a long-standing affair with a married man; Wendy, an acclaimed feminist intellectual; Adele, a former star of the stage, now practically homeless. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for one last weekend at Sylvie's old beach house. But fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface - a storm that will either remind them of the bond they share, or sweep away their friendship for good.The Faculty of Dreams: Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019
By Sara Stridsberg. 2006
In April 1988, Valerie Solanas - the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol - was discovered dead…
in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was only 52; alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings.In The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg revisits the hotel room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood, where she was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather, and the mental hospitals where she was interned.Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminisces and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a powerful, heartbreaking voice to the writer of the infamous SCUM Manifesto.Red at the Bone: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
By Jacqueline Woodson. 2019
THE TIMES '100 BEST SUMMER READS'NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLERLONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020'Sublime' Candice Carty-Williams'An epic in…
miniature' Tayari Jones 'A banger' Ta-Nehisi Coates'Generous and big-hearted' Brit Bennett 'A true spell of a book' Ocean Vuong 'A proclamation' R.O. Kwon'A little masterpiece' Paula Hawkins'I adored this book' Elizabeth MacNeal'Pure poetry' Observer'A sharply focused gem' Sunday Times'Will remind you why you love reading' Stylist'Haunting' Guardian'A wonderful, tragic, inspiring story' Metro'Prose that sings off the page... Gorgeous' Mail on Sunday'A nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships' Financial Times'As seductive as a Prince bop' O, The Oprah Magazine'Razor-sharp' Vanity Fair'Dazzling... With urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex' New York Times An unexpected teenage pregnancy brings together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments and longings that can bind or divide us. From the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming. Brooklyn, 2001. It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place.Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, identity, class, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, as it looks at the ways in which young people must so often make fateful decisions about their lives before they have even begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be. *** ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR: New York Times; Washington Post; Time; USA Today; O, The Oprah Magazine; Elle; Good Housekeeping; Esquire; NPR; New York Public Library; Library Journal; Kirkus; BookRiot; She Reads; The Undefeated ***The Natural Way of Things: 'The Handmaid's Tale for our age' (Economist)
By Charlotte Wood. 2015
'Savage: think Atwood in the outback' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train'An unforgettable reading experience' Liane Moriarty,…
author of Big Little Lies'Ferocious... recalls the early Elena Ferrante' NPR'A masterpiece' Guardian'Devastating' EconomistShe hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.'The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised.He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'"Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a brokendownproperty in the middle of a desert.Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be therewith eight other girls, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers.Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: ineach girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months,it becomes clear only the girls can rescue themselves. Winner, 2016 Stella PrizeWinner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year AwardWinner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Book AwardWinner, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for FictionWinner, Reader's Choice, 2016 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary AwardShortlisted, 2016 ABA Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice AwardLonglisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary AwardAlmost Love: the addictive story of obsessive love from the bestselling author of Asking for It
By Louise O'Neill. 2018
For fans of Marian Keyes, Dolly Alderton and Holly Bourne, ALMOST LOVE is one of the most addictive and heartbreaking…
reads of the year 'Compulsive' Sunday Times'Breaks another boundary' Irish Times'A must-read' Image 'Honest and poignant' Elle 'Intelligent and compelling' Daily Mail When Sarah falls for Matthew, she falls hard.So it doesn't matter that he's twenty years older. That he sees her only in secret. That, slowly but surely, she's sacrificing everything else in her life to be with him. Sarah's friends are worried. Her father can't understand how she could allow herself to be used like this. And she's on the verge of losing her job.But Sarah can't help it. She is addicted to being desired by Matthew. And love is supposed to hurt.Isn't it?His Whole Life
By Elizabeth Hay. 2015
Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly…
intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home.At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country, summer to winter, wellbeing to illness, the novel charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family comes apart.Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec is on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming of age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. It draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of one family and those closest to it. Hay explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers.Alone in the Classroom
By Elizabeth Hay. 2011
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing…
them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.Changing Heaven
By Jane Urquhart. 1990
Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to…
Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Brontë scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost - or the memory - of Emily Brontë. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm.Love in Five Acts
By Daniela Krien. 2021
"Highly recommended" Sunday Times"Utterly captivating" Woman and Home"Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021"Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times"Sparse and…
precise" Telegraph"Beautifully direct and lucid prose . . . fierce intelligence" Melbourne Age & Sydney Morning Herald"A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European"An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" ObserverBookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone? Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice. Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch