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Showing 1 - 20 of 2045 items
By Emma Donoghue. 2023
A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love…
at boarding school in nineteenth century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.By Mona Awad. 2023
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose…
mother's unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.By Michael Melgaard. 2023
By Nina Dunic. 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Globe and Mail 100 Best Book of 2023 CBC Books, Best Canadian Fiction…
2023 Apple Books, Best Canadian Debut 2023 and Best Book of the Month for September 2023 "We all lined up for our whipping by the shouting beauty and tender traumas of life. All of us so sensitive, and now this beautiful girl, with soft brown hair that was shot with gold in the sun. Another one of us starting to stumble." Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen, partying; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging – or trying to escape it. A promising audition, a lost promotion, intriguing strangers, a silent lover, and a grieving neighbour—in rich, sensual scenes and moody brilliance, The Clarion explores rituals of connection and belonging, themes of intimacy and performance, and how far we wander to find, or lose, our sense of self. Alternating between five days in Peter's life and several months of Stasi's, Dunic's debut novel captures the vague if hopeful melancholy of any generation that believes it was never "called" to something greatBy 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.By Alicia Elliott. 2023
*National Bestseller**Named a Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year*A Most Anticipated Book Pick by Toronto Star,…
CBC, The Walrus, Good Morning America, Bustle, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, Debutiful, Ms. Magazine, The Nerd Daily, and PasteA mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequencesOn the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be. She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve, is nothing but supportive; and they've recently moved to a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. And yet, Alice feels like an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from her watchful white neighbors. Her growing self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.At first, Alice is convinced her discomfort is of her own making, but then strange things start happening. She finds herself losing bits of time, hearing voices she can't explain, and speaking with things that should not be talking back to her, all while her neighbors' passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn's survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it's too late.Told in Alice's darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching look at inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable—and surreal—climax.By Anne Michaels. 2023
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERA breathtaking and mysterious new novel from the beloved Anne Michaels, internationally bestselling author of Fugitive Pieces and…
The Winter Vault.1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation. Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From the WW1 battlefield where the novel begins, and its opening lines, Held is alive with seeking: "We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”By Sheila Heti. 2024
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them…
alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.By Darren Greer. 2014
In the small town of North River, every day that goes by bleeds into the next. Poverty begets hopelessness, hopelessness…
breeds violence, violence causes despair. The only way to change fate, a minister tells his son, is to leave. The minister’s son, Jake MacNeil, chooses to ignore his father’s advice. Only when he realizes what has become of his life — working a grueling dead-end job, living with a drunk, friends with a murderer — does he decide to make something of himself. But nothing comes without a cost: in choosing freedom, Jake abandons his own son, Nathan, to the care of the boy’s abusive mother. Years later, a reformed Jake comes back for Nathan, to finally set things right. But in North River, everything comes around again; and when a dangerous figure from the past becomes hell-bent on dragging the new Jake “back down where he belongs”, three generations of MacNeil men must come together to pay the full price of hope. Gritty, unrelenting, yet peppered with Darren Greer’s trademark poignance, Just Beneath My Skin is the work of an author at the height of his game.By Carol Windley. 2006
From the acclaimed author of Visible Light comes a collection of seven outstanding stories, each set against the rural landscape…
of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. In these stories the memories and dreams of characters are examined, revealing them to be both cages and keys to the cages. The life lessons learned by the characters are often as complicated and painful as they are illuminating. In the title story, two sisters fall in love with their math tutor on one of the Gulf Islands, inhabited equally by the ghosts of the misfits and Hollywood stars who came to live there, and the children of an alternative school, run by the girls’ criminally optimistic father. In “Sand and Frost,” a young girl drops out of UBC, returns home, and discovers that her domineering grandmother is the sole survivor of a shocking act of family violence. In “What Saffi Knows,” a child, unable to explain to her self-involved parents, struggles with the knowledge of the whereabouts of another missing child. In these remarkable seven stories, Carol Windley creates a sense of place and of people that breathe the cool wet air of a spring morning on Gabriola Island.By Peter Unwin. 2013
In Life Without Death, the latest short story collection from Peter Unwin, ordinary men and women search for meaning in…
lives subject to change, chance, coincidence, and catastrophe. A man recalls a lifetime of love and loss while copying contacts out of his old little black book. A woman is left her dying father's secret stash of pornography, and is entrusted with the unenviable task of disposing of it. A new father unexpectedly discovers a way of connecting to his autistic son. For one day, guests to a wedding set aside their various past misdeeds in order to celebrate a young couple's union. A teenager newly introduced to a life of petty crime suddenly finds himself in way over his head. A man's former acquaintance resurfaces decades later as the subject of a haunting art film. Unwin's characters live full, complex lives within each story. Though they may not find the simple answers they seek, if such answers even exist, they-and readers-gain something farmore valuable on their journeys: perspective.By Susan Doherty Hannaford. 2015
Word Guild Award for Best Young Adult fiction 2016 Grace Irwin Award 2016 Literary Classics silver medal for Y/A fiction…
2016 Shortlisted for the Frank Hegyi Award-Ottawa Independent Writers Literary Classics silver medal for High school fiction 2017 Set in 1936 Montreal, A Secret Music is the story of Lawrence Nolan, a sensitive fifteen-year-old piano prodigy who grows up in the shadow of his mother’s mental illness. Forced to keep this shameful secret, he attempts to raise himself and his ten year old brother. He counteracts the deep ache and creeping mistrust caused by his mother’s emotional absence by escaping into the intense realm of Chopin and Schubert, the only language he understands. When his brother becomes ill, he is left with enormous responsibilities. At a piano competition in Montreal, Lawrence makes a climactic decision that puts his future on hold in order to salvage his family life. In A Secret Music, Susan Doherty Hannaford re-creates the Depression-Era world of Montreal and demonstrates how music can redeem a life.By Mary Rose Donnelly. 2011
Retired schoolteacher Flossy O’Reilly has spent almost all of her eight decades in the seaside community of Great Village, Nova…
Scotia. It is now a quiet Maritime village: where relationships between friends and family move at the pace of the tides; where there is no rush because, sooner or later, everyone finds out what they need to know with a trip to the general store. When Ruth, the teenaged granddaughter of an old friend, arrives from Ontario for a three-week stay, time suddenly catches up with Great Village. As Flossy watches the sometimes tactless young woman grow into her own, she begins to question whether maintaining the calm surface of her life was worth keeping secrets from and about those closest to her — or if everyone could benefit from a little more candour. With grace, patience, and wisdom, Mary Rose Donnelly paints a rich portrait of life in small-town Nova Scotia, and of relationships as charming as they are complex.By Aaron Bushkowsky. 2014
Alex is a playwright suffering from writer’s block and harsh reviews. His best friend, Roy, is a theatre director with…
lung cancer and six months left to live. In pursuit of fresh air and great wine, they go on a road trip to the Okanagan Valley, where Roy rediscovers his passion for theatre. But when he decides to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a winery, disaster ensues: the woman cast in the lead is the winery owner’s wife and has no talent; wildfires encroach upon the surrounding forest; and Roy slips closer to death, one cigarette at a time. Curtains for Roy is a hilarious peek into the world of theatre, where the greatest drama is offstage and the best performances take place behind the curtain.By Dimitri Nasrallah. 2022
This ePUB was produced through the Literary Image Description group’s “eBooks for Everyone” project and is the One eRead Canada…
selection for 2024. "A vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration. It’s 1986, and after four months of unemployment Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal from Beirut to escape a never-ending civil war. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec has confidence in a new arrival like her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center where she gets a job as a hotline operator. All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives--marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets. Much to her surprise, Muna finds that she is actually becoming successful at selling diet plans. Even though she’s pretending to be someone else, her natural empathy can’t help but shine when listening to the confidential tribulations of people who, elsewhere in life, wouldn’t sit with her for lunch or offer her a job. Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid love letter to the 1980s, bringing this era of Montreal into the current moment through his deeply endearing portrait of Muna Heddad’s struggle."By Olivie Blake. 2020
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes an intimate and contemporary study of time, space,…
and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.CHICAGO, SOMETIME--Two people meet in the armory of the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true.But this is not a story about endings.For Regan, life is a finish line of mutually assured disappointment. Her method of coping with the dreariness of existence is to project herself into imagined multipotency, spinning new threads of destiny with every impulsive decision she makes. For Aldo, life is a plague of constancy--a structure of rules and formulas that keep him going, without which the entire frame of his existence would collapse.For both of them, life is a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability, until six conversations with a stranger form the variable that glitches the entire simulation.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.By Jackie Lee Miles. 2010
"Roseflower Creek is a compelling, fast-paced narrative that captivates from the first page to the last. It is beautifully written…
and sensitively told. Don't miss it!" —Haywood Smith, author of Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch and The Red Hat Club"The morning I died it rained. Poured down so hard it washed the blood off my face."It seems everyone in young Lori Jean's life has a secret, but only one secret will cost her everything.A surprising tribute to our ability to heal and love in the most difficult circumstances. Roseflower Creek will stay with you long past its final page.What Readers Are Saying"This is the most touching and poignant novel I have ever read. I will remember Lori Jean for a long time and her outlook on life and forgiveness.""This story will break your heart and you will fall in love with Lori Jean.""Lori Jean's take on so many adventures has you smiling and laughing out loud at times. This character is a keeper and she will be in my heart along with Ellen Foster, Emma, Lily, and many other children that endear themselves to me through their creators.""The story will make you laugh and cry, touch your heart and soul, and linger on with you when the book is finished. You won't want to put it down."Praise for Roseflower Creek"Roseflower Creek is a deeply felt novel. The spirit of protagonist Lori Jean transcends the tragic boundaries of her life…and death." —Walter Sorrells, Edgar Award-winning author of Proof of Intent"Jackie Lee Miles has created a powerful work in Roseflower Creek. It gripped my heart and like a small angel flying close to my soul left a mark like no other story has ever done." —Dennis H. Christen, film producer, writer for TV series M*A*S*H"A powerful, extraordinary novel. The characters haunt the reader long after the last page is turned." —Earl Hamner, creator of The WaltonsThis sci-fi masterpiece is &“a moral tale that has elements of Aldous Huxley&’s Brave New World, Superman, and Star Wars&”…
(Los Angeles Times Book Review). In a world where the human population has suffered devastating losses, a handful of survivors cling to what passes for life in a post-apocalyptic, dying landscape. People wander, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss, through a barren landscape with no children, no art, and where reading is forbidden. From this bleak existence, a tragic love triangle springs forth. Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, runs the world, but his only wish is to die. Paul and Mary Lou are a man and a woman whose passion for each other sparks a jealousy in Spofforth—and provides the only hope for the future of human beings on Earth. Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Color of Money, delivers an elegiac dystopia of mankind coming to terms with its own imminent extinction. &“Because of its affirmation of such persistent human values as curiosity, courage, compassion, along with its undeniable narrative power, Mockingbird will become one of those books that coming generations will periodically rediscover with wonder and delight.&” —The Washington PostBy Connie Willis. 1997
&“Willis effortlessly juggles comedy of manners, chaos theory and a wide range of literary allusions [with a] near flawlessness of…
plot, character and prose.&”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel.Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He&’s been shuttling between the twenty-first century and the 1940s in search of a hideous Victorian vase called &“the bishop&’s bird stump&” as part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid.But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right—not only to save the project but also to prevent altering history itself.By Elia Barceló. 2003
Un orfebre prestigioso viaja, desde Nueva York, a su pueblo natal, en España, para reencontrarse con su pasado y con…
el amor que cambió su vida para siempre. «El secreto del orfebre es la más conmovedora, extraordinaria y hermosa novela corta de amor que he leído en mi vida.»Fernando Marías En esta reedición de El secreto del orfebre se añaden unas páginas inéditas del cuaderno de su protagonista, Celia Sanjuán; un texto adicional que convierte a esta novela de Elia Barceló en una nueva obra, reconfigurando su significado y ofreciendo con maestría otro giro final. En esta bellísima pieza literaria su autora nos recuerda que somos palabras, que somos seres que nos narramos a nosotros mismos, creando así nuestra propia historia. En la búsqueda nostálgica de algo que puede estar o no estar allí, esta novela corta tan breve como intensa presenta una historia de amor e identidad que desafía los hilos del tiempo, de la soledad y de la memoria, en aquel espacio en el que el deseo tiene su propia dimensión y la pasión sus propias leyes. Una novela llena de lírica y sentimientos, una historia de amor imposible. Una pieza de orfebrería, una joya literaria que nos lleva a sumergirnos en lo más recóndito de nosotros mismos. Porque también estamos hechos de la materia con la que se construyen los recuerdos. La crítica ha dicho:«El título alude a la pericia de fabricar con cosas pequeñas objetos preciosos. Eso es lo que Elia Barceló ha conseguido: crear una pequeña joya.»José Luis Charcán, La razón «Cumple fielmente el canon otorgado al género [de la nouvelle] y lo hace con una escasez de medios que la autora resuelve de manera inteligente. Pocas veces se puede decir más con menos.»Cultura|s de La Vanguardia «Con una prosa exquisita, una ambientación onírica y un retrato vívido de la España de los años cincuenta, setenta y noventa, Elia Barceló nos regala una de las historias de amor más hermosas y conmovedoras que he leído en mi vida. Es uno de esos libros que hay que leer para darse cuenta de lo que es escribir bien, pero bien de verdad.» Libros y literatura «Una historia de amor a lo clásico: intensa, desgarradora, trágica, atemporal. Un libro lleno de sentimientos,conmovedor y apasionante. Una joya, una delicatessen, un capricho para el lector.»Libros que hay que leer «Demuestra que no hacen falta muchas palabras ni un argumento enrevesado para conmover y atrapar al lector y expresar muchísimas cosas.»Adivina quien lee «Sin giros espectaculares e innecesarios, y desde la sencillez y la delicadeza de la narrativa de Elia Barceló, encontraréis una historia que os enamorará.»Algunos libros buenos«La magia envuelve esta historia de encuentros y desencuentros, donde hay amor y hay dolor, donde hay sitio para la pasión y para el anhelo, para una vida que era, que fue y que se perdió. Como una fábula pero sin moraleja, muy bien escrita.»Mil libros en mi biblioteca«Una pequeña novela, mezcla de cuento y fábula, absolutamente maravillosa, empapada de dulzura y ternura, con un lado fantástico que le aporta una dimensión suplementaria, donde todos los sueños son posibles.»Le club de rats de Biblionet, Francia «Una historia de amor romántico, imposible y consumado, que enciende el corazón de todo el que la lea.»Culturamas