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Showing 1 - 20 of 536 items
By Sarah Everett. 2023
“One of the best books I have read this year (maybe ever).” —Colby Sharp, Nerdy Book ClubNPR Books We Love…
2023 | Publishers Weekly Best of 2023 | Winner of the Governor General's Literary Awards for Young People's LiteratureA heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It's how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi's whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye."My heart hurt as I raced through the last chapters of this unique book that shines a light on family, friends, grief, and love." —Lisa Yee, author of Maizy Chen's Last ChanceBy Kai Cheng Thom. 2022
Connaissez-vous la chienne Laïka, la première de tous les êtres vivants à avoir voyagé dans l’espace? Ce livre vous raconte…
son histoire et les raisons qui l’ont poussée à quitter sa meute pour aller à la rencontre des étoiles. Quelque part entre le conte et la leçon d’histoire, Pour Laïka est un hommage aux liens qui unissent toutes les créatures de la Terre - et de l’Univers.By Donna Ashworth. 2023
FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF I WISH I KNEW For those cast adrift in the lonely sea of…
grief, this collection offers solace for when the water gets rough. Donna Ashworth's poetry reminds us that love and grief are intertwined, and life's true treasure lies in those we hold most dear. Intended to rejuvenate weary souls; these poems are a must for anyone who has lost someone. Readers are cherishing Loss - 'Emotional and beautifully written poems that reach out and speak to you.' ***** Amazon - 'I had to take multiple breaks just so I could read through my tears! It was so heartbreakingly beautiful that I just have no words!' ***** NetGalley - 'Simply WOW! Donna Ashworth's words touched my soul.' ***** NetGalley - 'Emotional and beautifully written poems that reach out and speak to you.' ***** NetGalleyBy Michael Ondaatje. 2024
One of the Globe and Mail's most anticipated books of 2024With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje…
returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is.Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a "mongrel," someone born out of diverse cultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories – but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: "Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn free stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities". Poetry – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame – is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.By Jean-Marie Lapointe. 2023
Même si on la sait inévitable, la mort fait peur. Comment changer notre attitude face à elle ? Alors qu'il…
était confronté à la fin imminente de son père, Jean Lapointe, Jean-Marie Lapointe se sentait en paix, malgré les émotions qui affluaient. Est-ce sa démarche spirituelle influencée par le bouddhisme tibétain qui a fait la différence ? Ou son expérience des vingt dernières années auprès des jeunes en fin de vie ? L'auteur relate ce dernier voyage, avec simplicité, douceur et bienveillanceBy Angela Sterritt. 2023
"A remarkable life story.... Angela Sterritt is a formidable storyteller and a passionate advocate." (Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow…
Thieves) "Sterritt's story is living proof of how courageous Indigenous women are." (Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations) In her memoir, Angela Sterritt shares her story from navigating life on the streets to becoming an award-winning journalist. As a teenager, she wrote in her notebook to survive. Now, she reports on cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, showing how colonialism and racism create a society where Indigenous people are devalued. Unbroken is a story about courage and strength against all odds.By Gary A Kowalski. 2012
La mort de notre petit compagnon est une épreuve des plus douloureuses. Ce livre rempli de conseils et de compassion…
aidera les lecteurs à accepter le deuil et à poursuivre leur vie.By Margaret Macpherson. 2022
In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the '60s and '70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare…
her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson's father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children.Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. Tracking the Caribou Queen is beautifully crafted to a purpose: poetic language and narrative threads dissect the trope that persisted through her girlhood, that of the Caribou Queen, a woman who seemed to embody extreme and contradictory stereotypes of Indigeneity. Here, Macpherson is not striving for a tidy ideal of "reconciliation"; what she is working towards is much messier, more complex and ambivalent and, ultimately, more equitable.By Jennifer Denetdale. 2007
In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on…
the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816-1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845-1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Diné, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Diné past. Reclaiming Diné History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the Diné has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. By scrutinizing stories about Juanita, she both underscores the centrality of women's roles in Navajo society and illustrates how oral tradition has been used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret the past. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. And she contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Diné can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history. AdultBy Dave McGillivray. 2018
Dave is a small kid who has big dreams! In this non-fiction picture book. The author shares his story about…
finding his passion for running, and how hard work and determination help him to overcome the obstacles and disappointments he encounters on the way to achieving his goals. For grades K-3By Stephen E Ambrose. 1996
By Stephen Chbosky. 1999
In 1991 Charlie is a high school freshman, reeling from his only friend's recent suicide. In a series of letters,…
the overly sensitive and intelligent Charlie describes making friends with two seniors, who are step-siblings, and growing up with their help. For senior high and older readers. 1999By Izzeldin Abuelaish. 2023
"What can you do? You can do a lot. You can support justice for all by speaking out loudly to…
your family, friends, community, politicians and religious leaders. You can support foundations that do good work. You can volunteer for humanitarian organizations. You can vote regressive politicians out of office. You can do many things to move the world toward greater harmony…"I know that what I have lost, what was taken from me, will never come back. But as a physician and a Muslim of deep faith, I need to move forward to the light, motivated by the spirits of those I lost. I need to bring them justice… I will keep moving but I need you to join me in this long journey."-from I Shall Not HateDr. Izzeldin Abuelaish - now known simply as "the Gaza doctor" captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: on January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza Strip, killing three of his daughters and a niece.By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, this is Abuelaish's account of a Gazan life in all its struggle and pain. A Palestinian doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Abuelaish is an infertility specialist who lived in Gaza but plied his specialty in Israeli hospitals. From the strip of land he calls home (a place where 1.5 million refugees are crammed into 360 square kilometres of land), the Gaza doctor has been crossing the lines that divide the region for most of his life, as a physician who treats patients on both sides of the border and as a humanitarian who sees the need for improved public health and education for women as the way forward in the Middle East.But it was Abuelaish's response to the loss of his children that made news and won him humanitarian awards around the world. Instead of seeking revenge or sinking into hatred, in this personal account of his life, Izzeldin Abuelaish is calling for the people of the Middle East to start talking to each other. His deepest hope is that his daughters will be the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.By Kwame Alexander. 2019
"Twin fourteen-year-old basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court, as their father…
ignores his declining health. Told in hip-hop style verse." -- Provided by NLSBy Ceylan Scott. 2019
Lime Grove is home to a number of teenagers with a variety of problems: anorexia, bipolar disorder, behavior issues. Tamar…
will come to know them all very well. But there's one question she can't...won't answer: What happened to her friend Iris? As Tamar's emotional angst becomes more and more clear to her, she'll have to figure out a path to forgiveness. UnratedBy Sheryl St. Germain. 2018
This honest and haunting collection of poems follows the loss of the poet's only son to heroin addiction. St. Germain…
takes us through the stages of her grief and offers no false promises or simple answers. These narrative-driven poems are a compelling and compassionate look into addiction and the effect it has on a family. 2018 Adult. Some strong languageBy Martha Baillie. 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL : BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023 Martha Baillie's richly layered response to her mother's passing,…
her father's life, and her sister's suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time. Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author's mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers Baillie's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the center of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother's. And then, third, shockingly, the author's sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life, just before the book the sisters co-authored is due to come out. In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report. "Martha Baillie's novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue , her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the "disobedient tale" of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie's variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." — Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women "This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn't put it down." — Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness "Exquisite." — Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife "I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss." — Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker "This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author's identity by way of her mother's death, her sister's failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." — Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday DemonBy Martine Béland. 2023
En mai 2020, une baleine égarée remonte le fleuve jusqu'à Montréal. Au moment où elle est retrouvée morte, la mère…
de Martine Béland rend l'âme au terme d'une longue maladie. Dans ses derniers moments, celle qui préférait souvent la compagnie des animaux à celle des humains demandait des nouvelles du "mégaptère", mot qu'elle employait pour désigner ce grand mammifère marin qui la fascinaitBy Ted Nolan. 2023
In 1997 Ted Nolan won the Jack Adams Award for best coach in the NHL. But he wouldn’t work in…
pro hockey again for almost a decade. What happened?Growing up on a First Nation reserve, young Ted Nolan built his own backyard hockey rink and wore skates many sizes too big. But poverty wasn’t his biggest challenge. Playing the game meant spending his life in two worlds: one in which he was loved and accepted and one where he was often told he didn’t belong.Ted proved he had what it took, joining the Detroit Red Wings in 1978. But when his on-ice career ended, he discovered his true passion wasn’t playing; it was coaching. First with the Soo Greyhounds and then with the Buffalo Sabres, Ted produced astonishing results. After his initial year as head coach with the Sabres, the club was being called the "hardest working team in professional sports." By his second, they had won their first Northeast Division title in sixteen years.Yet, the Sabres failed to re-sign their much-loved, award-winning coach.Life in Two Worlds chronicles those controversial years in Buffalo—and recounts how being shut out from the NHL left Ted frustrated, angry, and so vulnerable he almost destroyed his own life. It also tells of Ted’s inspiring recovery and his eventual return to a job he loved. But Life in Two Worlds is more than a story of succeeding against the odds. It’s an exploration of how a beloved sport can harbour subtle but devastating racism, of how a person can find purpose when opportunity and choice are stripped away, and of how focusing on what really matters can bring two worlds together.By Meg Kissinger. 2023
From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive…
exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them. Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger's family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it. While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family's struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country's flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies. Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family's love and resilience in face of great loss