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Showing 1 - 20 of 22405 items
By Margaret Atwood. 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEMargaret Atwood's dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, has become a modern…
classic—and now she brings the iconic story to a dramatic conclusion in this riveting sequel. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets. As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes. "The literary event of the year." —The Guardian "The international literary event of the season." —Globe and Mail "It’s terrifying and exhilarating." —Judges of the Booker Prize 2019By Cory Doctorow. 2019
Four novellas are connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today-- and what America could be in the near,…
near future. It's a world in which "smart" kitchen appliances will only work with certain manufacturers' ingredients. In which a Superman-like figure attempts to rectify the corruption of police forces he previously assisted. In which a man vents his anger against insurance companies that won't fund his wife's experimental drugs. And in which, to survive the coming economic collapse, a man creates a desert retreat in which nothing could possible go wrong. Canada Reads 2020. 2019.By Kenneth Oppel. 2020
The first book in bestselling author Kenneth Oppel’s explosive new trilogyIt was just rain.But after the downpour, odd black plants…
begin to shoot up.Suddenly—They. Are. Everywhere.They take over fields and twine around houses. They bloom and throw off toxic pollen—and feed.Strangely, three Salt Spring Island teens seem immune. Anaya, Petra and Seth. What’s their connection? What’s their secret? A week ago, they wouldn’t have thought they had one. But they’d better figure it out fast—the invasion has already begun.By William Gibson. 2020
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a…
sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston GlobeBy Suzanne Collins. 2020
Ambition will fuel him.Competition will drive him.But power has its price.It is the morning of the reaping that will kick…
off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.By Catherine Hernandez. 2020
The author of the acclaimed novel Scarborough weaves an unforgettable and timely dystopian account of a near-future when a queer…
Black performer and his allies join forces against an oppressive regime that is rounding up those deemed “Other” in concentration camps. In a terrifyingly familiar near-future, with massive floods that lead to rampant homelessness and devastation, a government-sanctioned regime called the Boots seizes the opportunity to force communities of colour, the disabled and the LGBTQ2S into labour camps in the city of Toronto.In the shadows, a new hero emerges. After his livelihood and the love of his life are taken away, Kay joins the resistance alongside Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee, and Firuzeh, a headstrong social worker. Guiding them in the use of weapons and close-quarters combat is Beck, a rogue army officer who helps them plan an uprising at a major internationally televised event.With her signature prose, described by Booklist as “raw yet beautiful, disturbing yet hopeful,” Catherine Hernandez creates a vision of the future that is all the more terrifying because it is very possible. A cautionary tale filled with fierce and vibrant characters, Crosshairs explores the universal desire to thrive, to love and to be loved as your true self.By Audrey Niffenegger. 2004
Audrey Niffenegger's innovative debut, The Time Traveler's Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an…
adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's marriage and their passionate love for each other, as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals -- steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.By Amanda Leduc. 2020
Amanda Leduc's brilliant new novel, woven with fairy tales of her own devising and replete with both catastrophe and magic,…
is a vision of what happens when we ignore the natural world and the darker parts of our own natures. Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family are among only a few who survived. But the mountain that looms over the city is still green--somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go. Her dad took her up the mountain when she was a child on a misguided quest to heal her legs, damaged at birth. The tragedy that resulted has shaped her life, bringing her both great sorrow and an undying connection to the deep magic of the mountain, made real by the beings she and her dad encountered that day: Estajfan, a centaur born of sorrow and of an ancient, impossible love, and his two siblings, marooned between the magical and the human world. Even as those in the city around her--led by Tasha, a charismatic doctor who fled to the city from the coast with her wife and other refugees--struggle to keep everyone alive, Heather constantly looks to the mountain, drawn by love, by fear, by the desire for rescue. She is torn in two by her awareness of what unleashed the meteor shower and what is coming for the few survivors, once the green and living earth makes a final reckoning of the usefulness of human life and finds it wanting. At times devastating, but ultimately redemptive, Amanda Leduc's fable for our uncertain times reminds us that the most important things in life aren't things at all, but rather the people we want by our side at the end of the world.By Jael Richardson. 2021
A fierce and illuminating debut from FOLD founder Jael Richardson about a young woman who must find the courage to…
determine her own future and secure her freedomSet in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. In this world, Elimina Dubois is one of only 100 babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity as part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government. But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself all alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Elimina is sent to an academy with new rules and expectations where she befriends Gutter children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever ways they know how. When Elimina’s life takes another unexpected turn, she will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longs for after all. Richardson’s Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. Elimina is a modern heroine in an altered but all too recognizable reality who must find the strength within herself to forge her future and defy a system that tries to shape her destiny.By Marie-France Comeau. 2021
Une pomme jaune garde en son coeur un secret étoilé. Au milieu de centaines de pommes rouges, une pomme un…
peu différente se laisse bercer par un rayon de lune. Une berceuse révèle enfin le secret derrière l’étoile mystérieuse cachée au coeur de chaque pomme. Le retour scintillant du classique jeunesse de Marie-France Comeau et Gilles Cormier dans une nouvelle présentation tout aussi croquante !By Marie-Célie Agnant. 2019
L’amour grandit, et bébé aussi ! Il remue ses jambes, ses poings et ses orteils, dans le ventre de sa…
maman. Ses parents l’espèrent, neuf mois durant, et comptent les étoiles. Bébé les espère, neuf mois durant, et sautille dans la bedaine. Maman guette ses mouvements. Papa rêve et dessine. Les semaines s’écoulent, la bedaine grandit et les parents ne savent plus quoi compter pour patienter.By Sheree Fitch. 2020
?From those first barefoot days, wobble-dy walking over rocks and pebbles, to wandering-wild while searching for sea glass and, finally,…
huddled-up cozy at a late-summer bonfire, these summer feet flutter kick, somersault, hide-and-seek, and dance in the rain, soaking up all the season has to offer. With Sheree Fitch's classic lip-slippery, lyrical rhymes and Carolyn Fisher's bright and colourful illustrations, Summer Feet will be an instant summertime favourite.By Chris Hadfield. 2021
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER The #1 bestselling Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back with an exceptional Cold War thriller from the…
dark heart of the Space Race. “An exciting journey to an alternate past” Andy Weir, author of The Martian “Nail-biting” James Cameron, writer and director of Avatar and Titanic “Not to be missed” Frederick Forsyth, author of The Day of the Jackal “Explosive” Gregg Hurwitz, author of Orphan X “Exciting, authentic” Linwood Barclay, author of Find You First1973. A final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny module, a quarter of a million miles from home. A quarter of a million miles from help. As Russian and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the lunar surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of his Soviet rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be. Full of the fascinating technical detail that fans of The Martian loved, and reminiscent of the thrilling claustrophobia, twists and tension of The Hunt for Red October, The Apollo Murders puts you right there in the moment. Experience the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of Space and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, as told by a former Commander of the International Space Station who has done all of those things in real life. Strap in and count down for the ride of a lifetime.By Rebecca Silver Slayter. 2021
A novel of haunting beauty and ominous suspense, The Second History is a post-apocalyptic love story about a young couple…
embarking on a journey to understand, for the first time, what they've been hiding from all their lives.Born in a barren, altered future world, Eban has lived in hiding all his life without ever understanding why. After his mother's death, he retreated into the northern Appalachians with Judy, the only other woman he has ever known.But as the years passed and Judy suffered multiple miscarriages, she began to wonder what happened to the cities their parents fled, where a strange sickness is said to have spread among those who stayed behind. To stop the headstrong woman he loves from leaving the safety of the hills to travel to the cities, Eban convinces Judy instead to set out on a journey to the fabled colony of the original mountain settlers, where he promises her they'll find the answers she seeks.Now expecting a child once again, Judy and Eban begin their climb deep into the mountains. Along the way, the people they encounter and the secrets they uncover will threaten their lives and the ties between them, further complicating what they know of the world beyond the mountains and of each other.Set in a far-flung time and place that begin to feel increasingly familiar, The Second History explores the devastating effects of environmental catastrophe on human relationships. It is a story about the limits of our ability to know each other or understand the past . . . and about the courage it takes to invent the world again for those we love.By Terry Fan, Eric Fan, Devin Fan. 2020
In a world built for Perfect Pets, Barnabus is a Failed Project, half mouse, half elephant, kept out of sight…
until his dreams of freedom lead him and his misfit friends on a perilous adventure. A stunning picture book from international bestsellers The Fan Brothers, joined by their brother Devin Fan. Deep underground beneath Perfect Pets, where children can buy genetically engineered "perfect" creatures, there is a secret lab. Barnabus and his friends live in this lab, but none of them is perfect. They are all Failed Projects. Barnabus has never been outside his tiny bell jar, yet he dreams of one day seeing the world above ground that his pal Pip the cockroach has told him about: a world with green hills and trees, and buildings that reach all the way to the sky, lit with their own stars. But Barnabus may have to reach the outside world sooner than he thought, because the Green Rubber Suits are about to recycle all Failed Projects . . . and Barnabus doesn't want to be made into a fluffier pet with bigger eyes. He just wants to be himself. So he decides it's time for he and the others to escape. With his little trunk and a lot of cooperation and courage, Barnabus sets out to find freedom -- and a place where he and his friends can finally be accepted for who they are. This suspenseful, poignant and magical story about following your dreams and finding where you truly belong will draw readers into a surreal, lushly detailed world in which perfection really means being true to yourself and your friends.By Kim Fu. 2022
The debut collection from PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and ‘propulsive storyteller’ (NYT Book Review), with stories that are by turns poignant…
and pulpy In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us. "Fu joins recent maestros Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, 2018), Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You, 2012), and Seong-nan Ha (Bluebeard’s First Wife, 2020) in creating irrefutably fantastic fiction." – Booklist, starred review "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of those rare collections that never suffers from which-one-was-that-again? syndrome. Every story here lights a flame in the memory, shining brighter as time goes by rather than dimming. Kim Fu writes with grace, wit, mischief, daring, and her own deep weird phosphorescent understanding." —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories "When a collection is evocative of authors as disparate as Ray Bradbury and Stephanie Vaughn, the only possible unifier can be originality: and that’s what a reader finds in Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. The strangest of concepts are tempered by grounded, funny dialogue in these stories, which churn with big ideas and craftily controlled antic energy." —Naben Ruthnum "How I loved the cool wit of these speculative stories! Filled with wonder and wondering, they’re haunted too by loss and loneliness, their imaginative reach profoundly rooted in the human condition." —Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself "Precise, elegant, uncanny, and mesmerizing–each story in this collection is a crystalline gem. Kim Fu's talent is singularly inventive, her every sentence a surprise and an adventure." —Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is for the adventurous reader–someone willing to walk into a story primed for cultural critique and suddenly come across a plot for murder, or to consider the dangers of sea monsters alongside those posed by twenty-first-century ennui. Each story is spectacularly smart, hybrid in genre, and bold with intention. The monsters here are not only fantastical figures brought to life in hyper-reality but also the strangest parts of the human heart. This book is as moving as it is monumental." —Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised "Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century crushes the coal-dark zeitgeist between its teeth and spits out diamonds, beautiful but razor-sharp. This will be one of the best short story collections of the year." —Indra Das, author of The DevourersBy John Elizabeth Stintzi. 2022
The brilliant new novel from the fiercely talented author of Vanishing Monuments, shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.…
On the morning of June 2, 2016, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, a mass that - three weeks later - will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world. For readers of Karen Tei Yamashita and Haruki Murakami and fans of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, My Volcano sets the mythic and absurd against the starkly realistic, attempting to portray what it feels like to live in a burning world stricken numb. My Volcano is a pre-apocalyptic vision following a global and diverse cast of characters, each experiencing private and collective eruptions: an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself 500 years in the past, where he lives through the fall of the Aztec Empire; a folktale scholar in Tokyo studies a story with indeterminate origins about a woman coming down a mountain to destroy villages and towns; a white trans writer living in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse with Doctors without Borders works with Syrian refugees in Greece as she tries to grapple with the trauma of surviving an American bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic herder in Mongolia is stung by a bee and finds himself transformed into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aims to cleanse the worldâ s most polluted places on its path toward assimilating every living thing on Earth into its consciousness. With audacious structure and poetic prose, My Volcano is an electrifying tapestry on fire.By Claudia Rueda. 2021
Goldilocks meets Little Red Riding Hood in this charming and unexpected fairytale mashup from the New York Times bestselling Illustrator…
of Easter Cat ! KNOCK! KNOCK! When the Three Bears answer the door, it's not Goldilocks they meet, but a stranger from a different story. It's Little Red Riding Hood-and the Big Bad Wolf is close behind her! Still, much unfolds as expected: porridge is eaten, a chair is broken, and there is a girl asleep in Baby Bear's bed. Does Little Red fit in this book after all? Perhaps it's the Wolf who will surprise us. With a bit of courage and much compassion, the Bears and Little Red learn that characters, just like the stories we tell, can change over time. In this quirky combination of familiar fairy tales, Claudia Rueda tells a new story about what happens when we open our minds, hearts, and homes to the utterly unexpected. FAIRYTALES-WITH A TWIST: From the original mind of Claudia Rueda, this fresh take on classic fairy tales is an inspired nod to the storytelling tradition and reveals how some of our most beloved, time-honored children's stories interact with each other . . . literally, and with hilarity. This fairytale mashup will charm even the most jaded of readers with its humor, its wild and endearing characters, and its unexpected meta twists. FOR FANS OF...: Sure to be read side-by-side with mash-up classics like Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and David Wiesner's The Three Pigs ! MILLENNIAL LITTLE RED: Little Red Riding Hood has got a punk personality and aesthetic. She breaks down the barriers that stand in her way, including escaping traditional narratives and endings. EMPATHY FOR THE WOLF: Is The Big Bad Wolf really so big, and really so bad? Approach a "villain" with a little empathy, and you may just make a new friend! INSPIRED BY BOOKS: Inspired by antique books, Claudia Rueda has infused this book with classic bookmaking, from flourishes on book covers and type design, to playing with meta touches like walking between books, past title pages, and in to other stories. CURRICULUM TIE-IN: Perfect for teachers and librarians looking for tools for teaching about storytelling and narrative. Perfect for: For fans of fairytale mash-ups, parents, educatorsBy Edwardian Taylor, Troy Wilson. 2021
Wee Bear is in desperate search of something new to read in this book-loving picture book retelling of the classic…
fairytale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In this adorable reimagining of the beloved classic, Wee Bear is on the hunt for something new to read. As he sets off through the woods, he stumbles upon Goldibooks's house. While she and her parents are out for a walk, Wee Bear makes himself at home. But Mama's books are too hard (hardcovers) and Papa's are too soft (paperbacks). Thankfully, Goldibooks's book collection is juuuust right! With a pile of books in-hand, Wee Bear sits down to read. But Mama's chair is too hard, and Papa's chair is too soft. Thankfully, Goldibook's chair is juuuuust right! Exhausted from reading so many books, Wee Bear tucks himself into bed. But Mama's bed is too hard, and Papa's bed is too soft. Thankfully, Goldibooks's bed is juuuust right! And that's where Goldibooks and her parents find him when they return home from their walk. As the story unfolds from there, readers are reminded that the best books are those we share with friends