Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 101 - 120 of 10015 items
By Howard Akler. 2005
1934. With Toronto stalled in the Great Depression, Mona Kantor makes a living as a pickpocket, while reporter Eli Morenz…
struggles to wring news stories out of the subdued city. When a chance photo drives Eli into the Jewish underworld that Mona inhabits, he finds he's stumbled onto the story of his life. Some descriptions of sex and strong language. 2005.By Robert Budde. 2002
Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to make a documentary about late poet Henry Black. To do so, he…
must unravel the threads of Henry's suicide-obsessed mind. As tools, he has only Black's poems and the addresses of two lovers. 2002.By Clem Martini. 2018
Titus Maccius Plautus' career is on the decline. Once famous for bringing Greek comedies to the Roman world, now he…
struggles to stage a single play. Unlucky with money and unlucky in love, Plautus faces the world with wry dignity. This could be the performance that returns fortune and reputation, or the one that ends it all. Engaging, thoughtful, and funny, "The Comedian" dives into the rough and tumble world of arts in its infancy. Martini draws on his experience to bring to life the signs and sounds of a world where playwrights suffered and succeeded - but mostly suffered. 2018.By David Zieroth. 2002
The tales that come with growing up on a prairie farm, and then leaving it for the big city, are…
recounted. Included are such happenings as a calf getting hit by lightning, a bag of squirming kittens, and the aftershocks of war passed down through the generations. For junior high readers. 2002.By Heather Tucker. 2016
Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had…
unravelled many times before. This time it explodes. Eight-year-old Hariet, known as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. But Mary and her partner, Nia, offer an unexpected refuge for Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper an imaginary seahorse. The respite does not last, and Ari is torn from her aunts and forced back to Toronto. Coming of age in the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father's legacy and her mother's addictions. Testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness, Ari spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love, the devilish and divine, with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses. 2016.By Janette Oke, T. Davis Bunn. 2011
As persecution of Christians intensifies, Julia - a merchant's daughter - finds hope in a new faith. When Jacob is…
hired to guard her father's caravan, Julia and the young man are drawn together - unaware they both are secretly delivering messages to believers scattered by persecution. Sequel to “The Hidden Flame”. 2011.By Isabel Huggan. 1984
A series of stories linked by a girl growing up in a small town. In "Jack of hearts", Elizabeth is…
cast in a male role for a ballet recital, and in "Sorrows of the flesh", a crush on the science teacher turns sour when he is exposed as a wife beater. Some strong language and some descriptions of sex. 1984.By Kerri Sakamoto. 1998
By C. S Richardson. 2012
Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre-Dame bakery, and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette,…
but also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading, and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving a mysterious traveller, an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found. c2012.By Tim Bowling. 2017
What happens when a respectable middle-aged father, teacher and writer decides one day to abandon his ordinary routine and embark…
on an unexpected journey toward an unknowable fate, following the ghost of Buster Keaton and a vision of a bear? The main character - a sort of contemporary version of Joyce's Leopold Bloom who just happens to be named Tim Bowling - spends an intense late-summer day in downtown Edmonton. Haunted by "the slender sadness" of the world, and unable to face his afternoon class, Tim Bowling finds himself pulled into an escapade revolving around an antique toy, a capuchin monkey and a young student our narrator likens to Pippi Longstocking. Accompanied by the shade of the silent-film star Buster Keaton, and the bear-shaped spirit of the American poet Delmore Schwartz, Bowling's Tim Bowling must confront a fundamental problem of our age: how to make and maintain human connections in a world that seems intent on destroying them? 2017.By Louise Penny. 2010
On a cold November morning, a jogger runs through the woods in the peaceful Quebec village of Three Pines. On…
his run, he finds a dead man hanging from a tree. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called to the crime scene. Some strong language and some descriptions of violence. c2010.By Alfred Silver. 2000
Maddie Prue is eternal and has lived a series of lives throughout time. During one of these lives she died…
a violent death and it is up to Henry Ryon, who seems to live cursed lives over and over, to discover the secret behind her death. c2000.By Karen Bass. 2016
Jared’s plane has crashed in the Alberta wilderness, and Kyle is first on the scene. When Jared insists on hiking…
up the highest hill in search of cell phone reception, Kyle hesitates; his Cree grandmother has always forbidden him to go near it. There’s no stopping Jared, though, so Kyle reluctantly follows. After a night spent on the hilltop - with no cell service - the teens discover something odd: the plane has disappeared. Nothing in the forest surrounding them seems right. In fact, things seem very wrong. And worst of all, something - a creature that should only exist in legend - is hunting them. For senior high readers. 2016.By Jennifer Manuel. 2016
Depicts the lonely world of Bernadette, a woman who has spent the last forty years living alone on the periphery…
of a remote West Coast First Nations reserve, serving as a nurse for the community. Only weeks from retirement, Bernadette finds herself unsettled, with no immediate family of her own. And then a shocking announcement crackles over the VHF radio of the remote medical outpost: Chase Charlie, the young man that Bernadette loves like a son, is missing. Winner of the 2017 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. 2016.By Harriet Alida Lye. 2018
The drought has discontented the bees. Soil dries into sand; honeycomb stiffens into wax. But Cynthia knows how to breathe…
life back into her farm: offer it as an artists' colony with free room, board, and "life experience" in exchange for backbreaking labor. Silvia, a wide-eyed graduate and would-be poet, and Ibrahim, a painter distracted by constant inspiration, are drawn to Cynthia's offer, and soon, to each other. But something lies beneath the surface. The Edenic farm is plagued by events that strike Silvia as ominous: taps run red, scalps itch with lice, frogs swarm the pond. One by one, the other residents leave. As summer tenses into autumn, Cynthia's shadowed past is revealed and Silvia becomes increasingly paralyzed by doubt. 2018.By Jill MacLean. 2013
Sigrid Sugden is a Shrike, a member of one of the toughest group of girls in school. They are experts…
at blackmail, extortion and bullying their terrorized classmates. But one day, the Shrikes go too far. Sigrid realizes that their favourite victim, Prinny Murphy, is in real danger. She makes a decision that will save Prinny from danger, but will turn the Shrikes anger and bullying against their former friend who betrayed them to the authorities. For junior high and older readers. Sequel to “The present tense of Prinny Murphy”. 2013.By André Alexis. 2016
Thief Tancred Palmieri meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict, who reveals that her very wealthy father has recently passed…
away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle: a Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Even when Willow dies, Tancred presses on, while fending off Willow's heroin dealers and lying to Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend. 2016.By Karen Rivers. 2003
Sixteen-year-old Haley is in her last year of high school, and she likes to think she's just a normal girl,…
plagued with all the normal teenage problems. But then disaster strikes: she comes down with the chickenpox and no one will speak to her. Worse still, her hippie dad is in trouble with the law. Junior and senior high readers. 2003.By David Homel, Fred A Reed, Monique Proulx. 2003
Florence doesn't like writers, books, dogs, alcohol, old people, pleasure, or love, only her partner Zeno - though she'd never…
admit it. The two of them run an Internet business that puts lesser known writers and artists back in the limelight. Zeno sends Florence to find his favourite author, the mysterious Pierre Laliberté, in this novel of literature and the people who create it. Strong language. Canada Reads 2004. 2002, 2003. Uniform title: Cœur est un muscle involontaire.By Russell Wangersky. 2006
A short fiction collection of characters, caught in a variety of human circumstances, making some outstandingly bad decisions. A labourer…
enjoys new-found popularity among his co-workers after losing several fingers in a work accident, and in the face of returning invisibility, makes a desperate decision; a man on an ill-conceived vacation decides to stay in a hot tub all day and all night, rather than face his disintegrating family. Some descriptions of violence. Some descriptions of sex. Some strong language. 2006.