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Showing 1 - 20 of 21715 items
By Susan Ouriou. 2016
Ten-year-old Nathan has a number of demons to confront and overcome. One of them is the school bully who delights…
in tormenting Nathan wherever he comes upon him and that can happen in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Another challenge is that Nathan's Grampa is suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer's, and because Nathan is devoted to his grandfather, they both have to navigate this difficult new challenge in the family's life. Grampa moves in with Nathan, his mother and father, and together they try to figure out how things are going to work from here on in. Finally, Grampa introduces Nathan to a part of his heritage he knew nothing about until now: a First Nations link with a great-grandmother, now long gone, whose story of hope inspires Nathan to overcome his own worries.By Zsuzsi Gartner. 2020
“One of the best reads of the year.”—Toronto Star An electrifying debut novel from the Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Better…
Living Through Plastic Explosives that takes readers for a wild ride with urban-gothic flair and delectably wicked humour. Lucy is a lapsed-Catholic whose adolescent pretensions to sainthood are unexpectedly revived. It all starts when her cousin Zoltan, in hospital following a bizarre incident at a party, offers her a disturbing deathbed confession. Lucy's grief takes an unusual turn: Zoltan's death appears to have turned her into a magnet for the unshriven. Lucy is transformed into a self-described "flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall" as strangers unburden themselves to her. She becomes addicted to the dark stories, finds herself jonesing for hit after hit.As the confessions pile up, Lucy begins to wonder if Zoltan's death was as random and unscripted as it appeared. She clutches at alarming synchronicities, seeks meaning in the stories of strangers. Why do the stories seem connected to each other or eerily echo elements of her life? Could it be because Lucy has her own transgressions to acknowledge? And then there is that stubbornly resurfacing past, like a tell-tale ribbon of hair snagged on a fish hook. With ruthless wit and dizzying energy, The Beguiling explores blessings and curses, sainthood and sin, mortality and guilt in all its guises. Weaving together tales of errant mothers, vengeful plants, canine wisdom, and murder, it lays bare the flesh and blood sacrifices people are willing to make to get what they think they desire.By Dana Vachon, Jim Carrey. 2020
NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"None of this is real and all of it is true." --Jim CarreyFrom movie star Jim…
Carrey and novelist Dana Vachon, a fearless and semi-autobiographical novel about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, destruction of persona, our "one big soul," Canada, and apocalypses within and without.Meet Jim Carrey. Sure, he's an insanely successful and beloved movie star drowning in wealth and privilege--but he's also lonely. Maybe past his prime. Maybe even...getting fat? He's tried diets, gurus, and cuddlin' with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. Even the advice of his best friend, actor and dinosaur skull collector, Nicolas Cage, isn't enough to pull Carrey out of his slump.Then Jim meets Georgie: ruthless ingénue, love of his life. And thanks to auteur screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, he has a role to play in a boundary-pushing new picture that may help him uncover a whole new side to himself. Finally, his Oscar vehicle! Things are looking up. But the universe has other plans.Memoirs and Misinformation is a fearless semi-autobiographical novel, a deconstruction of persona. In it, Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon have fashioned a story about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, our "one big soul," Canada, and a cataclysmic ending of the world--apocalypses within and without.By Yara El-Ghadban. 2020
A bold and innovative novel, I Am Ariel Sharon dives into the tortured mind of the controversial Israeli prime minister…
as he lies comatose and faces an ultimate reckoning.Award-winning Palestinian Canadian novelist Yara El-Ghadban imagines the confrontation at death’s door between Ariel Sharon, the “King of Israel,” and the women closest to him — his mother, his wives, and the mysterious nurse Rita. Like latter-day Greek furies, they lament the brutality of his life and maltreatment of the Palestinian people and demand he face up to his part in the bloodshed of Israel’s wars.Here is an extraordinary, magical, and impassioned story of nearly impossible empathy, the singular work of a novelist in full flight.By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2020
Award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson returns with a bold reimagination of the novel, one that combines narrative…
and poetic fragments through a careful and fierce reclamation of Anishinaabe aesthetics. Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural urban-settler world, a world of SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, Fjällräven Kånken backpacks, and coffee mugs emblazoned with institutional logos. And each searches out the natural world, only to discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted, and consumed. Cut off from nature, the characters are cut off from their natural selves. Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,” and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making. It is a lived experience. It is a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy with the daily labours of healing — healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together. Enter and be changed.By Deni Béchard. 2020
A time warp into the strange and painful life of men past, present, and future.The second time Andrew sees his…
half-brother, Hugh, is at their father's funeral. Andrew has little interest in the father with whom he grew up, but Hugh, who looks like a country-rock star, is fascinated by the life and writings of the reclusive man he hardly knew. When Hugh finds a book in his father's study, a mysterious work by Rafael Estrada, he is certain that it holds the key to his identity.A Song from Faraway takes readers from 19th-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq. An Irish-Acadian soldier carries his fiddle and folksong across the battlefields of the First World War. An orphan-turned-assassin pursues his target across the deserts of Mexico and Texas, using a novel as evidence for his location. Relationships are forged and broken, wars are fought, and trauma is handed down from father to son.With whispers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Song from Faraway pieces together "the stories that we tell about ourselves" in a picaresque novel of uncommon beauty and ferocity.By Chief Mi'Sel Joe, Sheila O'Neill. 2021
In 1822, William Epps Cormack sought the expertise of a guide who could lead him across Newfoundland in search of…
the last remaining Beothuk camps on the island. In his journals, Cormack refers to his guide only as “My Indian.” Now, almost two hundred years later, Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill reclaim the story of Sylvester Joe, the Mi’kmaq guide engaged by Cormack. In a remarkable feat of historical fiction, My Indian follows Sylvester Joe from his birth (in what is now known as Miawpukek First Nation) and early life in his community to his journey across the island with Cormack. But will Sylvester Joe lead Cormack to the Beothuk, or will he protect the Beothuk and lead his colonial explorer away? In rewriting the narrative of Cormack’s journey from the perspective of his Mi’kmaq guide, My Indian reclaims Sylvester Joe’s identity.By Marie Cadieux. 2016
Martin est un adolescent normal vivant à Dieppe. Mais la guerre fait rage et son pays, la France, est occupé…
par les Nazis. La cohabitation est difficile et les conditions de vie, précaires. Logé chez Madame Agnès, une vieille dame débrouillarde et dégourdie, Martin sera entraîné malgré lui dans le terrible second conflit mondial et fera une rencontre qui bouleversera sa vie…By Kevin Qamaniq-Mason, Mary Qamaniq-Mason, Hwei Lim. 2020
Pakak is in a new foster home. Feeling alone and uncertain, he finds comfort in a secret shared with him…
by his grandmother, and in the knowledge that he is loved no matter how far away his family may be.By Joshua Whitehead. 2020
A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and…
groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through Utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderón, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah TomBy Kathryn Hartley. 2021
Nestled in the rolling foothills, where the prairie climbs to meet the Rocky Mountains, lies the small town of Cougar…
Lake. You know these towns. You've driven through them. Maybe even stopped for a bite at the Copper Kettle café. In this book all the doors in town swing quietly open. Each inhabitant's life and story intersects with others like overlapping ripples in the water. Each story stands alone but each story reaches tendrils into others. The residents form a cast of beguiling, sometimes eccentric, characters. As the book progresses, we gradually discover their loves and longings, their histories and their dreams. We learn what brought them to Cougar Lake and, more importantly, what keeps them here. In the end the town stands together to survive. Here are the stories, the dramas, the heartbreak and the glories of the town and the people of Cougar Lake.By Saeed Teebi. 2022
Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink.…
Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight.By Danielle Daniel. 2022
The middle-grade debut of star picture-book author and illustrator Danielle DanielAdventurous, trail-blazing Wolf lives in a northern mining town and…
spends her days exploring the mountains and wilderness with her three best friends Penny, Ann and Brandi. The girls’ secret refuge is their tree-house hideaway, Birchwood, Wolf’s favourite place on earth. When her beloved grandmother tells her that she is the great-granddaughter of a tree talker, Wolf knows that she is destined to protect the birch trees and wildlife that surround her.But Wolf’s mother doesn’t understand this connection at all. Not only is she reluctant to engage with their family’s Indigenous roots, she seems suspiciously on the wrong side of the environmental protection efforts in their hometown. To make matters worse, she’s just started dating an annoying new boyfriend named Roger, whose motives—and construction company—seem equally suspect.As summer arrives, so do bigger problems. Wolf and her friends discover orange plastic bands wrapped around the trees near their cherished hangout spot, and their once stable friendship seems on the verge of unravelling. Birchwood has given them so much—can they even stay together long enough to save this special place?With gorgeous yet understated language, Danielle Daniel beautifully captures an urgent and aching time in a young person’s life. To read this astonishing middle-grade debut is to have your heart broken and then tenderly mended.By Nicholas Herring. 2022
Herring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life, bored of thinking the same old thoughts. One December…
day, following a hunch, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the course of everything in his life. His wife Euna leaves with their children. He buries the family dog in a frozen grave on Christmas Eve. He and his friend Gerry crash his truck into a field, only to be rescued by a passing group of Tibetan monks.During the spring lobster season, Herring and Gerry find themselves caught in a storm front. Herring falls overboard miles from the harbour, is lost at sea for days, and assumed to be drowned. And then, he is found, miraculously, alive. Having come so near to death, he is forced to confront the things he fears the most: love, friendship, belief, and himself.Some Hellish is a story about anguish and salvation, the quiet grace and patience of transformation, the powers of addiction and fear, the plausibility of forgiveness, and the immense capacity of friendship and of love.By Kevin Lambert. 2022
As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but…
when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.By David Robertson, David A. Robertson, Julie Flett. 2021
A picture book celebrating Indigenous culture and traditions shares a story that honors our connections to our past and our…
grandfathers and fathers.A boy and Moshom, his grandpa, take a trip together to visit a place of great meaning to Moshom. A trapline is where people hunt and live off the land, and it was where Moshom grew up. As they embark on their northern journey, the child repeatedly asks his grandfather, "Is this your trapline?" Along the way, the boy finds himself imagining what life was like two generations ago -- a life that appears to be both different from and similar to his life now. This is a heartfelt story about memory, imagination and intergenerational connection that perfectly captures the experience of a young child's wonder as he is introduced to places and stories that hold meaning for his family.By Kim Thúy. 2021
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE Kim Thúy's Em is a virtuosic novel of profound power and sensitivity, and…
an enduring affirmation of the greatest act of resistance: love.In the midst of war, an ordinary miracle: an abandoned baby tenderly cared for by a young boy living on the streets of Saigon. The boy is Louis, the child of a long-gone American soldier. Louis calls the baby em Hồng, em meaning "little sister," or "beloved." Even though her cradle is nothing more than a cardboard box, em Hồng's life holds every possibility. Through the linked destinies of a family of characters, the novel takes its inspiration from historical events, including Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975, and the remarkable growth of the nail salon industry, dominated by Vietnamese expatriates all over the world. From the rubber plantations of Indochina to the massacre at My Lai, Kim Thúy sifts through the layers of pain and trauma in stories we thought we knew, revealing transcendent moments of grace and the invincibility of the human spirit."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."--[SDMBy Elizabeth Hay. 2023
From the Giller Prize-winning author comes a novel, witty and wise, about thwarted ambition, unrealized dreams, the enduring bonds of…
female friendship, and love’s capacity to surprise us at any age.In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama, but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more.Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the lifelong friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.