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Showing 1 - 20 of 49 items
By Zoe Maeve. 2021
The Shining meets Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in this gripping debut from an award-winning talent.The Gift opens on the snow-blanketed…
grounds of the Alexander Palace in Western Russia where a moth has come to attend the birth of the fourth Romanov princess, Anastasia. She and her siblings grow up in a gilded world, isolated from the society beyond the palace walls despite their dominion over it. After mysteriously receiving a camera on her fifteenth birthday, she begins to document her world, but the gift carries with it a weight she can't yet see. A creature moves on the edge of her vision and stalks her dreams. As the revolution unfolds, the confines of Anastasia's world keep closing in. Something is following her, and it might not be human.By Rivka Galchen. 2016
Rivka Galchen's Little Labors is a droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies and…
literature Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book--a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen's new book--contains a list of "Things That Make One Nervous." And wouldn't the blessed event top almost anyone's list? Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen's puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of "women writers"; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favorite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today's new chic color for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies gold mines; babies as tiny Godzillas ... Little Labors-atomized and exploratory, conceptually byzantine and freshly forthright-delights.By Michel Tremblay, Sheila Fischman. 1998
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father, Réauna, affectionately known throughout Tremblay's work as…
"Nana," was sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents' farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic enclave of two hundred souls. At the age of ten, amid swaying fields of wheat under the idyllic prairie sky of her loving foster family, Nana is suddenly told by her mother, whom she hasn't seen in five years and who now lives in Montreal, to come "home" and help take care of her new baby brother.So it is that Nana, with her faint recollection of the smell of the sea, embarks alone on an epic journey by train through Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa, on which she encounters a dizzying array of strangers and distant relatives, including Ti-Lou, the "she-wolf of Ottawa."To our delight, Michel Tremblay here takes his readers outside Quebec for the first time, on a quintessential North American journey - it is 1913, at a time of industry and adventure, when crossing the continent was an enterprise undertaken by so many, young and old, from myriads of cultures, unimpeded by the abstractly constructed borders and identities that have so fractured our world of today.This, the first in Tremblay's series of "crossings" novels, provides us with the back-story to the characters of his great Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal, particularly of his mother, "The Fat Woman Next Door ..." and his maternal grandmother, who, though largely uneducated, was a voracious reader and introduced him to the world of reading and books, including Tintin adventure comics, mass-market novels, and The Inn of the Guardian Angel, which fascinated the young Tremblay with its sections of dramatic dialogue, inspiring the many great plays he would eventually write.By Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
Praise for A Jew Must Die:"Chessex, our new Flaubert, has no equal when describing horror without flinching, screaming sotto voce…
and exploring guilt in taut prose."--Le Nouvel Observateur"A masterpiece. Beauty of the world, ubiquity of evil, God's silence, it's all there, delivered like a slap to the face."--Le Point"A great author explores a nightmare not as anachronistic as it might appear."--L'HebdoA novel based on a true story.On April 16, 1942, a handful of Swiss Nazis in Payerne lure Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle merchant, into an empty stable and kill him with a crowbar. Europe is in flames, but this is Switzerland, and Payerne, a rural market town of butchers and bankers, is more worried about unemployment and local bankruptcies than the fate of nations across the border. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames it all on the town's Jewish population and wants to set an example, thinking the German embassy would be grateful. Ischi's dream of becoming the local gauleiter is shattered, however, when the milk containers used to dissimulate Bloch's body parts is discovered floating in a lake nearby, leading to his arrest.Jacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is one of Switzerland's greatest authors. He knew the murderers, went to school with their children, and has written a terse, implacable story that has awakened memories in a country that seems to endlessly rediscover dark areas of its past.By Cynthia Zarin. 2013
An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the…
author's experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time's passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor ("a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth"). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child's illness, Mary McCarthy's file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.By Santa Montefiore, Ruth Marshall, Susanna Kearsley, Maria Mutch, Genevieve Graham, Marissa Stapley. 2018
Escape the cold winter and look ahead to all that the spring has to offer with The Look Book, featuring…
samples from just a few of the highly anticipated fiction and nonfiction titles on Simon & Schuster Canada’s Spring 2018 list. This season’s sampler offers an array of options. Spend a summer in an inn on the idyllic St. Lawrence River meeting the innkeepers, their granddaughter, and the boy she has always loved. Laugh out loud with a memoir about one woman’s journey to recovery after a debilitating diagnosis turned her life upside down. Try the startlingly inventive and evocative short stories from a Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist. Travel to Castle Deverill, nestled in the rolling Irish hills, and lose yourself in an epic tale of secrets, and the enduring bond between three women and a castle they will never forget. And finally, dig in to a love story set in 1750’s New York or experience the tumultuous life of Nova Scotia during World War II. With chapter excerpts from: Things to Do When It’s Raining, by Marissa Stapley Walk It Off: The True and Hilarious Story of How I Learned to Stand, Walk, Pee, Run, and Have Sex Again After a Nightmarish Diagnosis Turned My Awesome Life Upside Down, by Ruth Marshall When We Were Birds, by Maria Mutch Songs of Love and War, by Santa Montefiore Bellewether, by Susanna Kearsley Come from Away, by Genevieve Graham Happy Reading! The Team at Simon & Schuster Canada If you would like to learn more about any of our authors or the titles featured, please visit us at SimonandSchuster.ca, follow us on Twitter at @simonschusterCA, or like us at Facebook.com/SimonandSchusterCanada.By Riyukta Raghunath. 2020
This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary…
genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.&‘But now, having travelled to the frontier of the world of sins, I no longer hesitated in trampling over the…
remnants of the goodness in my heart.&’Manada, Maani didi, Feroza Bibi, Miss Mukherjee – the jostling identities of our beguiling and charming protagonist as she glides through a life that can be seen as exploitative yet, also, curiously, empowering and honest. Manada&’s fascinating life story takes her from her wealthy cossetted upbringing to a life of debauchery and prostitution after she elopes with her married lover when in her mid-teens. She is capable, attractive and doesn&’t ask for pity as she struggles with illness, poverty and abandonment, but ensures that she emerges relatively unscathed and carves a niche for herself in her profession.Manada matures and settles into a life of prostitution, entertains barristers, doctors and other men of high society. She describes her colourful life with relish but is often introspective as she places her own position as a sex worker in the context of the times, calling out young sanctimonious patriotic men who maintain a high standing in society yet secretly fancy prostitutes. Rather tantalisingly she takes no names, only occasionally hinting at their identities, to avoid scandals and protect the double lives of men who are well-known in Calcutta in the 1920s. Weaving together multiple strands, looking beyond ideas of morality and accusations, we are presented a life of immense beauty and endurance, which is both grand in its scope and deeply intimate in its portrait.By Ida Simons. 2014
It is the middle of the roaring twenties, and Gittel is living The Hague with her parents, whose blazing rows…
are the traditional preserve of Sundays and public holidays. What luck, then, that Gittel is Jewish, and must submit to "the double helping of public holidays that is the lot of Jewish families".After every matrimonial slanging match, Gittel's mother runs off to her parents' home in Antwerp - with her daugher in tow. Much to her delight, Gittel makes the acquaintance of the well-to-do Mardell family, who allow her to practise on their Steinway. Gittel feels that she is taken seriously by Mr Mardell, the head of the household, and by thirty-year-old Lucie, whom she adores. When these friendships turn out to be nothing but an illusion, Gittel learns her first lessons about trust and betrayal. Her second comes soon after, when her father, whose talents for business leave much to be desired, attempts to make a quick killing in Berlin on the eve of the Wall Street Crash.Though this intimate portrayal of familial strife is set in the shadow of the Holocaust, Simons says little about the horror that awaits her characters, yet she succeeds in giving the reader the sense that the novel is about more than a young girl's loss of innocence. In a fluid, almost casual style, she has written a masterly and timeless ode to a relatively carefree interlude in a dark and dramatic period.Translated from the Dutch by Liz WatersBy Jill Mansell. 2016
In this delightful ebook, Jill Mansell gives readers an exclusive glimpse of her life as a writer. Newly updated with…
exclusive extra material! Find out what's IN JILL'S HANDBAG, enjoy A DINNER DATE WITH JILL and get to know Jill in a QUICKFIRE Q & A.This updated ebook also includes a sneak peek at Jill's new novel for January 2017, MEET ME AT BEACHCOMBER BAY.And as in the original A-Z OF HAPPINESS, there's a bear (not a real one), lit up by fairy lights, with zillions of happy endings buzzing around, eating Chinese takeaway for breakfast, getting up late and tweeting A LOT. Oh, and there's been an explosion in the glitter factory!Recommended for all with withdrawal symptoms from YOU AND ME, ALWAYS, and anticipation disorder for MEET ME AT BEACHCOMBER BAY.NOT A NOVEL - but a little happiness fix.By Sarah Lotz. 2015
You're seventeen. One night, more or less by accident, you set fire to a garden shed.Naturally, you pack up and…
run off to Paris, certain you can make enough money off your art to get by. You're young, you're pretty, you're full of life, and you have your best friend in all the world by your side.What could possibly go wrong?Sarah Lotz's hilarious, heartbreaking first novel has only ever been published in South Africa - Hodder & Stoughton are proud to be brining it to a world-wide audience, newly edited and with an all-new cover.By Andrea Bajani. 2010
When Sarah leaves him - heartbroken by their inability to conceive - Pietro reverts to a younger self, leaving the…
dishes unwashed, his bed unmade and the post unopened. Soon afterwards, Sarah confesses that she is pregnant, but from a casual encounter. She comes to rely on Pietro's mother for support, leaving all three in a painful limbo, unable to move on or return to the way things were. Into the void falls Olmo, an old man haunted by memories of war. At first he provides a distraction, but when he asks Pietro to travel to Russia on his behalf, to right a wrong from his past, he offers this most troubled of young men the chance of a new beginning.By Prof Bernhard Schlink. 2018
A #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Bernhard Schlink speaks straight to the heart' New York Times'Brilliant... A tale of love and loss in…
20th century Germany' Evening Standard'A cleverly-constructed tale of cross-class romance' Mail on Sunday'A poignant portrait of a woman out of step with her time' Observer Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees her as second-best.When she falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with the era's dreams of power, glory and greatness, her life is irremediably changed.Theirs is a love against all odds, entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leading us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west.This is the story of that love, of Olga's devotion to a restless man - told in thought, letters and in a fateful moment of great rebellion.It's the most wonderful time of the year - but can the East End Angels keep London safe?Meet The East…
End Angels, the newest members of Station Seventy-Five's ambulance crew . . .Frankie is trying hard to keep everything together. She can count on the support of the East End Angels, even in the face of family trouble.Winnie's beloved husband, Mac, is putting himself at risk every day in the bomb disposal unit and she's finding it hard while he's away.Bella is growing in confidence and happiness. Her friendship with Winnie's brother, James, is getting closer all the time.Christmas on the Home Front is a hard time with loved ones far away - but the women of the Auxiliary Ambulance service are making do and mending.The third novel in the acclaimed East End Angels series, following Bella, Winnie and Frankie and their lives as members of Station Seventy-Five's ambulance crew. Perfect for fans of Sheila Newberry and Katie Flynn.Readers love the East End Angels series . . . 'Wonderfully written by one very talented author . . . highly recommended''I loved reading this book . . . so looking forward to the next in the series''Reminded me of Call the Midwife''Absolutely brilliant for recreating life in London during the Blitz''A very well-written and researched, warm-hearted book . . . with a bit of romance!'*Don't miss Rosie Hendry's brand new novel, THE MOTHER'S DAY CLUB, coming 18th February 2021 and available now to pre-order*By Steven Uhly. 2014
HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH - THE TIMESOne night in autumn 1944, a gunshot echoes through the alleyways of…
a small town in occupied Poland. An S.S. officer is shot dead by a young Polish Jew, Margarita Ejzenstain. In retaliation, his commander orders the execution of thirty-seven Poles - one for every year of the dead man's life. First hidden by a German couple, Margarita must then flee the brutal advance of the Soviet army with her new-born baby. So begins a thrilling panorama of intermingled destinies and events that reverberate from that single act of defiance. KINGDOM OF TWILIGHT follows the lives of Jewish refugees and a German family resettled from Bukovina, as well as a former S.S. officer, chronicling the geographical and psychological dislocation generated by war. A quest for identity and truth takes them from Displaced Persons camps to Lübeck, Berlin, Tel Aviv and New York, as they try to make sense of a changed world, and of their place in it. Hypnotically lyrical and intensely moving, Steven Uhly's epic novel is a finely nuanced and yet shattering exploration of universal themes: love, hatred, doubt, survival, guilt, humanity and redemption.For readers of HHHH by Laurent Binet, THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell, THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis, and ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony DoerrTranslated from the German by Jamie BullochBy Andrea Bajani. 2010
When Sarah leaves him - heartbroken by their inability to conceive - Pietro reverts to a younger self, leaving the…
dishes unwashed, his bed unmade and the post unopened. Soon afterwards, Sarah confesses that she is pregnant, but from a casual encounter. She comes to rely on Pietro's mother for support, leaving all three in a painful limbo, unable to move on or return to the way things were. Into the void falls Olmo, an old man haunted by memories of war. At first he provides a distraction, but when he asks Pietro to travel to Russia on his behalf, to right a wrong from his past, he offers this most troubled of young men the chance of a new beginning.By Nathacha Appanah. 2007
In the remote forests of Mauritius, young Raj is almost oblivious of the Second World War raging beyond his tiny…
exotic island. With only his mother for company while his father works as a prison guard, solitary ever since his brothers died years ago, Raj thinks only of making friends.One day, the far-away world comes to Mauritius, and Raj meets David, a Jew exiled from his home in Europe and imprisoned in the camp where Raj's father works. David becomes the friend that he has always longed for, a brother to replace those he has lost. Raj knows that he must help David to escape. As they flee through sub-tropical landscapes and devastating storms, the boys battle hunger and malaria - and forge a friendship only death can destroy. The Last Brother is a powerful, poetic novel that sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of 20th-century history.By Magda Szabó. 1970
A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war."A school story for grownups that is also about…
our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS"Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership. It's an adventure story, brilliantly written" TIBOR FISCHEROf all her novels, Magda Szabó's Abigail is indeed the most widely read in her native Hungary. Now, fifty years after it was written, it appears for the first time in English, joining Katalin Street and The Door in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to live with the consequences. It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the "Jewish question" and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is preparing to occupy the country. Foreseeing this, and concerned for his daughter's safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a boarding school away from the capital. A lively, sophisticated, somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she is given, and when the school turns out to be a fiercely Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home, she rebels outright. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates and things quickly turn sour.It is the start of a long and bitter learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to other people's true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first time to the realities of life for those less privileged than herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love.Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix