Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 20719 items
The Testaments: A Novel
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 2019Bloom (The Bloom Trilogy)
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.Agency (The jackpot Trilogy Ser. #2)
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 GlobeThe Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger Games)
By 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.Crosshairs: A Novel
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.The Time Traveler's Wife: Audrey Niffenegger's Novel The Time Traveler's Wife (Bookclub-in-a-box Discusses Ser.)
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.The Centaur's Wife
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.The Apollo Murders
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.The Second History
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.Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
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 DevourersAutonomy
By Victoria Hetherington. 2022
After being detained at the border of the New Canadian Protectorate, university counsellor Slaton meets an AI, Julian, who works…
interviewing detainees at the Canadian/American border. As a plague ravages the planet, they encounter a strange bubble of super-rich elite, whose ploy for immortality will spell danger for them all.Hunting by stars: (a Marrow Thieves Novel)
By Cherie Dimaline. 2021
The thrilling follow-up to the bestselling, award-winning novel The Marrow Thieves, about a dystopian world where the Indigenous people of…
North America are being hunted for their bone marrow and ability to dream.Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up--or are re-opened--across the land to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams.Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to these schools and has spent the years since heading north with his new found family: a group of other dreamers, who, like him, are trying to build and thrive as a community. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone for the first time in years, and he knows immediately where he is--and what it will take to escape. Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers--school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go--and how many loved ones is he willing to betray--in order to survive. This engrossing, action-packed, deftly-drawn novel expands on the world of Cherie Dimaline's award-winning The Marrow Thieves, and it will haunt readers long after they've turned the final pageThe Book of Rain
By Thomas Wharton. 2023
A groundbreaking, deeply affecting work of environmental literary suspense for fans of Cloud Atlas, The Overstory, and Station Eleven.The northern…
mining town of River Meadows is one of three hotspots in the world producing ghost ore, a new source of energy worth twenty-eight times its weight in gold. It's also linked with slippages of time and space that gradually render the area uninhabitable. After the town is evacuated, the whole region is cordoned off, the new no-go zone wryly nicknamed "the Park."Three intertwined stories flow from the disaster of River Meadows. Alex Hewitt and his sister, Amery, were among the first to be shipped out of the contaminated town. Now an accomplished game designer, Alex has moved on, but his sister has not, making increasingly dangerous break-ins to save animals trapped in the toxic wasteland. When at last she fails to return from a trip inside the fence, Alex flies to River Meadows to search for her, enlisting her friend, Michio Amano, a mathematician who needs to transcend the known laws of physics if he and Alex are to succeed.Claire Foley ran away from River Meadows as a teenager and now traffics in endangered wildlife. As Alex and Michio search for Amery, Claire arrives in an island nation under threat of environmental catastrophe to retrieve her greatest prize yet, only to find herself facing a life-altering choice.And, finally, in a future as distant as myth, a flock of birds sets out on a dangerous journey to prevent the extinction of their ancient enemy, humanity. The account they hand down is an Epic of Gilgamesh for our times, illuminating the wisdom of nature and our flawed stewardship of the planet. As sweeping in scope as a world of its own, The Book of Rain is a novel of epic reach, beautifully multi-layered, haunting and profound.The Future (Biblioasis International Translation Series #44)
By Catherine Leroux, Susan Ouriou. 2023
Longlisted for Canada Reads 2023 • One of Tor.com's Can't Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC…
Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of Kirkus Reviews' Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees. In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance. When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.Moon of the Turning Leaves
By Waubgeshig Rice. 2023
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERTwelve years after the lights go out . . . An epic journey to a forgotten homelandThe hotly…
anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow.In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in a world after everything, Evan’s people are stronger than ever. But resources around their new settlement are drying up, and elders warn that they cannot stay indefinitely. Evan and his teenaged daughter, Nangohns, are chosen to lead a scouting party on a months-long trip down to their traditional home on the shores of Lake Huron—to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life—and what danger—still exists in the lands to the south.Waubgeshig Rice’s exhilarating return to the world first explored in Moon of the Crusted Snow is a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth.Blast Off! (Abby in Orbit)
By Andrea J. Loney. 2023
The Secret Explorers and the Moon Mission (The Secret Explorers #9)
By Sj King. 2022
Blast off into space with this lunar themed installment of DK Books' new educational fiction series for children. Meet the…
Secret Explorers--a band of brainiac kids from all over the world. Everyone in this diverse group of young experts has a specialty, from outer space to dinosaurs, and each story follows a character who gets chosen for a "secret exploration." In this fun, fact-filled children's book, space expert Roshni and geology expert Cheng blast off into outer space on a mission to the moon. There, they must navigate the dangerous terrain to clear up space debris before it can interfere with a lunar mission! Along the way the Secret Explorers pilot a space buggy and collect important rock samples. (STORY DETAILS TBC). With a gripping narrative that keeps kids engaged, The Secret Explorers and the Moon Mission book by SJ King is the perfect gift for children who are into all things space. It's written for children aged 7-9 years, with lots of information about astronomy and space, to give them an exciting introduction to lunar exploration. At the end of this fictional book, you'll find "Roshni' Mission Notes" which is a summary of all the scientific facts and discoveries made throughout the story. With fun illustrations, quizzes, and a vocabulary list, the educational value of this book is outstanding and great for a classroom read!Trading in Danger (Vatta's War #1)
By Elizabeth Moon. 2003
Kylara Vatta is the only daughter in a family full of sons, and her father's only child to buck tradition…
by choosing a military career instead of joining the family business. For Ky, it's no contest: Even running the prestigious Vatta Transport Ltd. shipping concern can't hold a candle to shipping out as an officer aboard an interstellar cruiser. It's adventure, not commerce, that stirs her soul. And despite her family's misgivings, there can be no doubt that a Vatta in the service will prove a valuable asset. But with a single error in judgment, it all comes crumbling down.Expelled from the Academy in disgrace-and returning home to her humiliated family, a storm of high-profile media coverage, and the gaping void of her own future-Ky is ready to face the inevitable onslaught of anger, disappointment, even pity. But soon after opportunity's door slams shut, Ky finds herself with a ticket to ride- and a shot at redemption-as captain of a Vatta Transport ship.It's a simple assignment: escorting one of the Vatta fleet's oldest ships on its final voyage . . . to the scrapyard. But keeping it simple has never been Ky's style. And even though her father has provided a crew of seasoned veterans to baby-sit the fledgling captain on her maiden milk run, they can't stop Ky from turning the routine mission into a risky venture-in the name of turning a profit for Vatta Transport, of course.By snapping up a lucrative delivery contract defaulted on by a rival company, and using part of the proceeds to upgrade her condemned vehicle, Ky aims to prove she's got more going for her than just her family's famous name. But business will soon have to take a backseat to bravery, when Ky's change of plans sails her and the crew straight into the middle of a colonial war. For all her commercial savvy, it's her military training and born-soldier's instincts that Ky will need to call on in the face of deadly combat, dangerous mercenaries, and violent mutiny. . . .From the Hardcover edition.The Hollow Man
By Dan Simmons. 1978
Jeremy Bremen has a secret. All his life he's been cursed with the ability to read minds. He knows the…
secret thoughts, fears, and desires of others as if they were his own. For years, his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the burden of this terrible knowledge. But Gail is dying, her mindebbing slowly away, leaving him vulnerable to the chaotic flood of thought that threatens to sweep away his sanity. Now Jeremy is on the run--from his mind, from his past, from himself--hoping to find peace in isolation. Instead he witnesses an act of brutality that propels him on a treacherous trek across adark and dangerous America. From a fantasy theme park to the lair of a killer to a sterile hospital room in St. Louis, he follows a voice that is calling him to witness the stunning mystery at the heart of mortality.From the Paperback edition.Black Star Rising
By Frederik Pohl. 1985