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Ancestral vices
By Tom Sharpe. 1982
Headlong: a novel
By Michael Frayn. 1998
Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, an easily distracted philosopher and his art-historian wife are asked to assess…
three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is a lost work by Bruegel, or so Martin believes. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and concealments, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn't, embarks on a quest to prove his hunch.Angus, thongs and full-frontal snogging: confessions of Georgia Nicolson
By Louise Rennison. 1999
Georgia Nicolson's life is a disaster, and she shares a year of it with the reader through her diary. Her…
cat has gone crazy, her parents don't know anything about anything and there are some things, thongs for instance, that she just doesn't get. Senior high readers. 1999.The world according to Garp: a novel
By John Irving. 1976
The fictional life and times of T.S. Garp, the famous writer and son of Jenny, an early feminist leader. Throughout…
his life, he meets a wide range of eccentric characters, including kindly whores, assassins, school teachers and wrestlers. Some strong language and some explicit descriptions of sex. 1997, c1976.Penny Dreadful is a record breaker (Penny Dreadful. #5.)
By Joanna Nadin. 2013
Three humourous short stories in one book: Penny Dreadful versus the Vampire, in which Penny is worried about growing up…
to be a clown and decides to embark on a career as a vampire hunter instead; Penny Dreadful Looks on the Bright Side, in which miserable Grandma Grimshaw comes to stay and Penny and her best friend Cosmo appeal to her softer side, and Penny Dreadful and the World Record, in which Penny attempts to get her name in the record books. Grades 2-4. 2015.Penny Dreadful is a complete catastrophe (Penny Dreadful. #2.)
By Joanna Nadin. 2011
My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The 'Dreadful' bit is my dad's JOKE. But it…
is not even true that I am dreadful. It is utterly not my fault that the Patented Burglar Trap accidentally tripped Gran over, so her bone went snap. Also, I only took Barry the cat to the hospital so he could revive Gran with The Power Of Pets. How was I to know it would be a Complete CATastrophe? Grades 2-4. 2011.Penny Dreadful is a magnet for disaster (Penny Dreadful. #1.)
By Joanna Nadin. 2011
My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The 'Dreadful' bit is my dad's JOKE. It is…
not even true that I am dreadful. It's just that sometimes my BRILLIANT IDEAS don't work out completely brilliantly. Like, I didn't mean for my cousin to end up bald and covered in superglue, and I also didn't mean to steal our neighbour's dog and make him speak Russian. I'm just a Magnet for Disaster. Grades 2-4. 2011.Bilal's brilliant bee
By Michael Rosen. 2016
Bilal is terrified of The Test. He can't answer any of the questions! But then Bumble the bee comes along,…
and he can answer any question you ask, even the really tricky ones. Then Bilal's granny suggests they go on the wildly popular TV quiz show, What's What? Win the Lot! But what will happen if Bilal and Bumble do win the lot? Summer Reading Challenge 2017. Grades K-3. 2016.When We Were Vikings
By Andrew David MacDonald. 2020
Indie Next Pick for February 2020 Book of the Month January 2020 LibraryReads January 2020 Pick Bookreporter New Release Spotlight…
New York Post “Best Books of the Week” Goodreads “January’s Most Anticipated New Books” The Saturday Evening Post “10 Books for the New Year” PopSugar “The 18 Best New Books Coming Out in January 2020” Book Riot Best Winter New Releases A heart-swelling debut for fans of The Silver Linings Playbook and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.Sometimes life isn’t as simple as heroes and villains. For Zelda, a twenty-one-year-old Viking enthusiast who lives with her older brother, Gert, life is best lived with some basic rules: 1. A smile means “thank you for doing something small that I liked.” 2. Fist bumps and dabs = respect. 3. Strange people are not appreciated in her home. 4. Tomatoes must go in the middle of the sandwich and not get the bread wet. 5. Sometimes the most important things don’t fit on lists. But when Zelda finds out that Gert has resorted to some questionable—and dangerous—methods to make enough money to keep them afloat, Zelda decides to launch her own quest. Her mission: to be legendary. It isn’t long before Zelda finds herself in a battle that tests the reach of her heroism, her love for her brother, and the depth of her Viking strength. When We Were Vikings is an uplifting debut about an unlikely heroine whose journey will leave you wanting to embark on a quest of your own, because after all... We are all legends of our own making.Indians on Vacation: A Novel
By Thomas King. 2020
Meet Bird and Mimi in this brilliant new novel from one of Canada’s foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of…
old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years earlier, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace Mimi’s long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe. “I’m sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress. ‘My god,’ she whispers, ‘can it get any better?’” By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple’s holiday trip to Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political. Bestseller.Memoirs and Misinformation: A novel
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.Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy
By Gary Barwin. 2021
A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941…
Nazi invasion of Lithuania in this wild and witty yet heartrending novel from the bestselling author of Yiddish for Pirates, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May--novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. In his dreams, Motl is a fast-talking, rugged, expert gunslinger capable of dealing with the Nazi threat. But only in his dreams.As friends and neighbours are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins. But they immediately risk everything to try rescue relatives they hope are still alive. With death all around him, Motl decides that a Jew's best revenge is not only to live, but to procreate. In order to achieve this, though, he must relocate those most crucial pieces of his anatomy lost to him in a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the previous war. It's an absurd yet life-affirming mission, made even more urgent when he's separated from his mother, and isn't sure whether she's alive or dead. Joining forces, and eventually hearts, with Esther, a Jewish woman whose family has been killed, Motl ventures across Europe, a kaleidoscope of narrow escapes and close encounters with everyone from Himmler, to circus performers, double agents, quislings, fake "Indians" and real ones. Motl at last figures out that he has more connection to the Indigenous characters in western novels than the cowboys.An imaginative and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism and masculinity--saturated in Gary Barwin's sharp wit and perfect pun-play--Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind novel of sheer genius.Crow
By Amy Spurway. 2019
Winner, IPPY Award for Best First Book - Fiction and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for FictionRunner-up, Leacock…
Medal for HumourShortlisted, Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award and Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary FictionWhen Stacey Fortune is diagnosed with three highly unpredictable — and inoperable — brain tumours, she abandons the crumbling glamour of her life in Toronto for her mother Effie's scruffy trailer in rural Cape Breton. Back home, she's known as Crow, and everybody suspects that her family is cursed.With her future all but sealed, Crow decides to go down in a blaze of unforgettable glory by writing a memoir that will raise eyebrows and drop jaws. She'll dig up "the dirt" on her family tree, including the supposed curse, and uncover the truth about her mysterious father, who disappeared a month before she was born.But first, Crow must contend with an eclectic assortment of characters, including her gossipy Aunt Peggy, hedonistic party-pal Char, homebound best friend Allie, and high-school flame Willy. She'll also have to figure out how to live with her mother and how to muddle through the unsettling visual disturbances that are becoming more and more vivid each day.Witty, energetic, and crackling with sharp Cape Breton humour, Crow is a story of big twists, big personalities, big drama, and even bigger heart.Dirty Birds
By Morgan Murray. 2020
***LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2021*** ***FOREWORD INDIES HUMOUR AWARD FINALIST*** ***THE GLOBE AND MAIL SUMMER'S HOTTEST READS*** In late 2008,…
as the world’s economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario – not to be confused with Milton, Ontario – leaves his parents’ basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless twenty-something Millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah – Leonard Cohen. Hilariously ironic and irreverent, in Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray generates a quest novel for the twenty-first century—a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller—where a hero’s greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime, and sleeping in all day.Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead: A Novel
By Emily Austin. 2021
In this “fun, page-turner of a novel” (Sarah Haywood, New York Times bestselling author) that’s perfect for fans of Mostly…
Dead Things and Goodbye, Vitamin, a morbidly anxious young woman stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church and soon finds herself obsessed with her predecessor’s mysterious death. Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace. In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence. With a “kindhearted heroine we all need right now” (Courtney Maum, New York Times bestselling author), Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling and “delightfully weird reminder that we will one day turn to dust and that yes, this is depressing, but it’s also what makes life beautiful” (Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl).Sufferance: A Novel
By Thomas King. 2021
Jeremiah Camp, a.k.a. the Forecaster, can look into the heart of humanity and see the patterns that create opportunities and…
profits for the rich and powerful. Problem is, Camp has looked one too many times, has seen what he hadn’t expected to see and has come away from the abyss with no hope for himself or for the future. So Jeremiah does what any intelligent, sensitive person would do. He runs away. Goes into hiding in a small town, at an old residential school on an even smaller Indian reserve, with no phone, no Internet, no television. With the windows shut, the door locked, the mailbox removed to discourage any connection with the world, he feels safe at last. Except nobody told the locals that they were to leave Jeremiah alone. And then his past comes calling. Ash Locken, head of the Locken Group, the multinational consortium that Jeremiah has fled, arrives on his doorstep with a simple proposition. She wants our hero to formulate one more forecast, and she’s not about to take no for an answer. Before he left the Locken empire, Jeremiah had created a list of twelve names, every one a billionaire. The problem is, the people on the list are dying at an alarming and unnatural rate. And Ash Locken wants to know why. A sly and satirical look at the fractures in modern existence, Sufferance is a bold and provocative novel about the social and political consequences of the inequality created by privilege and power—and what we might do about it.A Hero of Our Time: A Novel
By Naben Ruthnum. 2022
A wry comic novel with an acerbic wit, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity…
initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity.Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white colleague Olivia Robinson’s quest for corporate domination at AAP, an edutech startup determined to automate higher education.Osman, obsessed by Olivia’s ability to successfully disguise ambition and self-interest as collectivist diversity politics, is bent on exposing her. Aided by his colleague turned comrade-in-arms Nena, who loathes and tolerates him in equal measure, Osman delves into Olivia's twisted past. But at every turn, he's stymied by his unfailing gift for cruel observation, which he turns with most ferocity on himself, without ever noticing what it is that stops him from connecting to anyone in his past or present. As Osman loses his grip on his family, Nena, and everything he thought was essential to his identity, he confronts an enemy who may simply be too good at her job to be defeated. A Hero of Our Time cracks the veneer of well-intentioned race conversations in the West, dismantles cheery narratives of progress through tech and “streamlined” education, and exposes the venomous self-congratulation and devouring lust for wealth, power, and property that lurks beneath.Politically correct holiday stories: for an enlightened yuletide season
By James Finn Garner. 1995
A new twist on old holiday favorites. Santa is described as an "overweight patriarchal oppressor" and Rudolph becomes the "nasally…
empowered reindeer." Also includes politically correct interpretations of "Frosty the snowman," "The nutcracker," and "A Christmas carol."High fidelity
By Nick Hornby. 1995
For Rob Fleming, thirty-five years old, a pop addict and owner of a failing record shop, several questions need answering.…
His girlfriend has just left him; if she comes back, will he still love her? Can he go on living in a poky flat or should he get a real home, a real family and a real job? Will he ever sleep with someone who has a record deal?The snapper: A Novel (Rabbitte family saga ; #2)
By Roddy Doyle. 1990
Twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte is content to be pregnant, but unwilling to reveal the father's embarrassing identity. Relieved by the good-natured…
acceptance of her family and friends, Sharon is dismayed when the child's father decides to do the right thing. Strong language. Sequel to "The Commitments" (DC11477), followed by "The van" (DC13303). 1990. (Rabbitte family saga ; 2)