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Showing 1 - 20 of 249 items
By Melanie Florence, Richard Scrimger. 2022
Two kids from different worlds form an unexpected friendship.Cody’s home life is a messy, too-often terrifying story of neglect and…
abuse. Cody himself is a smart kid, a survivor with a wicked sense of humour that helps him see past his circumstances and begin to try to get himself out.Autumn is, quite literally, on the other side of the tracks from him. Her home life is loving and secure, and she is “in” with the popular girls at school, even if she has a secret life as a glasses-wearing, self-professed comic book nerd at home. And even if the pressure to fit in at school requires hours of time spent making herself look “perfect.”Returning home from a movie one evening, Autumn comes across Cody, face down in the laneway behind her house. All Cody knows is that he can’t take another beating from his father like the one he just narrowly escaped. He can’t go home, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go either. Autumn won’t turn her back on him, even if they never really were friends at school. She agrees to let him hide out in her dad’s art studio at night.Over the next couple of days of Autumn sneaking Cody food and bandages, his story comes out. And so does hers.Told in alternating narratives, Autumn Bird and the Runaway is a breathtaking collaboration by two of Canada’s finest writers of books for young readers. Infused with themes of identity, belonging and compassion, it’s a story that reminds us that we are all more than our circumstances, and we are all more connected than we think.By Suri Rosen. 2023
A story of two kids trying to save the world they know and heal the families they have.It’s the summer…
of 2003 and thirteen-year-old astronomer Noah Cooper has just moved to Queensport, a small town with a vast amateur sky full of stars. There he meets Tara Dhillon, a lonely girl and aspiring filmmaker. When the two team up to produce an astronomy movie and enter a film contest, they discover a secret plan to turn their rural hamlet into a huge subdivision.Noah and Tara must use their unique skills to identify the culprits who plan on paving over the historic county — and try to save the infinite beauty of the stars. As if that’s not enough to have at stake, Noah needs to win the prize money to buy a new telescope for his unemployed father — an ex-astronomer who’s almost given up on the stars, as well as life on earth.Touching on themes of activism, environmental anxiety and mental health, A Bucket of Stars will have readers cheering for Noah, a boy whose head is in the stars, and Tara, a girl who lives in a world of digital images — and their special bond that just might mend the world around them.By Lynne Reid Banks. 1975
By Della Parker. 2016
'Brims with laughs, love, family and friendship. You will love this heartwarming read!' Trisha Ashley. Meet the Reading Group: six…
women in the seaside village of Little Sanderton come together every month to share their love of reading. No topic is off-limits: books, family, love and loss . . . and don't forget the glass of red!Grace knows that the holiday season is going to be different this year. No turkey, no tinsel, no gorgeously wrapped gifts under the tree . . . how on earth is she going to break it to her little boys that Christmas is effectively cancelled? And can she bear to tell anyone her embarrassing secret? Enter the Reading Group: Grace's life might have turned upside down but there's no problem they can't solve.By Wilt L. Idema, Stephen H. West. 2005
No cycle of historical legends has enjoyed greater or more enduring popularity in China than that of the Three Kingdoms,…
which recounts the dramatic story of the civil wars (c. AD 180-220) that divided the old Han empire into the Shu-Han, Wei, and Wu states, and the eventual reunification of the realm under the Western Jin in AD 280.By David Gregory. 2006
What if a fascinating stranger knew you better than you know yourself? When her husband comes home with a farfetched…
story about eating dinner with someone he believes to be Jesus, Mattie Cominsky thinks this may signal the end of her shaky marriage. Convinced that Nick is, at best, turning into a religious nut, the self-described agnostic hopes that a quick business trip will give her time to think things through. On board the plane, Mattie strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger. When she discovers their shared scorn for religion, she confides her frustration over her husband’s recent conversion. The stranger suggests that perhaps her husband isn’t seeking religion but true spiritual connection, an idea that prompts her to reflect on her own search for fulfillment. As their conversation turns to issues of spiritual longing and deeper questions about the nature of God, Mattie finds herself increasingly drawn to this insightful stranger. But when the discussion unexpectedly turns personal, touching on things she’s never told anyone, Mattie is startled and disturbed. Who is this man who seems to peer straight into her soul? From the Hardcover edition.By Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary. 2000
Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, The Dark employs…
Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. The Dark is the most captivating example of Chejfec's unique narrative approach.By Sheila Fischman, Larry Tremblay. 2014
The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering…
event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her - and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.By Suzanne Kamata. 2007
A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an…
intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong.Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she's settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill's duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider's knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice. Suzanne Kamata's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.By Yu Young-Nan, Yom Sang-Seop. 2005
Touted as one of Korea's most important works of fiction, Three Generations (published in 1931 as a serial in Chosun…
Ilbo) charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese occupied Seoul. Yom's keenly observant eye reveals family tensions withprofound insight. Delving deeply into each character's history and beliefs, he illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses driving each. This Korean classic, often compared to Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, reveals the country's situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, and the battle between the modern and the traditional. The long-awaited publication of this masterpiece is a vital addition to Korean literature in English.By Sindiwe Magona. 1998
Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who…
remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation's first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor's son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl's mother. The murderer's mother, Mandisi, writes about her life, the life of her child, and the colonized society that not only allowed, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence.By David Gregory. 2005
Un misterioso sobre llega al escritorio de Nick Cominsky entre una pila de solicitudes para tarjetas de crédito y envíos…
por correo relacionados al trabajo. Aunque su semana de trabajo de setenta horas ya ha consumido parte perder la oportunidad de ver qué tipo de trampa le han preparado sus colegas.Nick, que por lo general es seguro de sí mismo y cínico, pronto se halla en una situación inquietante, arrastrado hacia una fascinante conversación con un hombre desconcertante que discute la existencia del cielo y el infierno. Y este hombre, que dice ser Jesús de Nazaret, también parece tener una asombrosa cantidad de información sobre la vida privada de Nick.A medida que avanza la noche, la conversación giraalrededor de la vida, Dios, el dolor, la fe y la duda... y parece que tener una Cena con un perfecto desconocido pudiera cambiar para siempre la vida de Nick.From the Hardcover edition.By Steven L. Peck. 2011
What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout, and a poet abducted by aliens come together in 1970's…
Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the hoary La Sal Mountains.Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum's illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of the murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical?Take a blazing ride with Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, the Lord's Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab. His short rich life spans the borderlands of magical realism where geology, ecology philosophy, and consciousness collide, in Steven L. Peck's rip-snorting tale The Scholar of Moab.Steven L. Peck knows Moab, inside out. An evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, Peck teaches the philosophy of biology. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, Biology & Philosophy. Steven also co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship. His creative works include a novel, The Gift of the King's Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications). His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, Red Rock Review and other magazines. Peck was nominated for the 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award. Other awards include the Meyhew Short Story Contest, First Place at Warp and Weave, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest, and Second Place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest.The Scholar of Moab was award the best novel of 2011 by the Association of Mormon Letters, and was selected as a finalist for the Montaigne Medal (a national award for the most thought-provoking books being considered for the Eric Hoffer Award).By Charles Dickens. 2012
En 2012 se cumplen doscientos años del nacimiento de Charles Dickens, el escritor por antonomasia de la Inglaterra victoriana, y…
uno de los autores más grandes de todos los tiempos. Entre sus obras más populares se cita siempre su extraordinaria novela corta Cuento de Navidad, donde retrata a un avaro ricachón, Ebenezer Scrooge, que recibe la visita moralizante de los espíritus de las navidades pasadas, las presentes y las futuras. Pero Dickens es autor de otros muchos relatos relacionados con la época navideña, que se reúnen, por primera vez en castellano, en este volumen. La Navidad es uno de los personajes dickensianos por excelencia, la época del año en la que sus asuntos favoritos, la pobreza, la caridad, la compasión, la ternura, la solidaridad o la esperanza, se dirimen y cobran mayor relevancia.By Marilyn Booth, Hassan Daoud. 2014
"I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin's Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese…
civil war."--Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman"In The Penguin's Song, a city falls, a father dies, two women walk the same road over and over, a boy with a broken body dreams of love. Like Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy, this spare yet lyrical parable tells us more about exile, loss and the wearing away of hope than most us want to know. I love this beautiful book."--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances and The End of Youth"Daoud's novel is an elegiac account of loneliness and separation. . . . This is a haunting story inhabited by the ghosts of past lives and demolished buildings, where desires are left unfulfilled and loneliness sweeps through every soul."--Publishers Weekly"Daoud's claustrophobic novel hauntingly conveys one family's isolation after being relocated during the Lebanese civil war. . . . Daoud's evocation of history as it is experienced is excellent. His characters live through momentous events, but their struggles to survive land them in a kind of purgatory. A novel that defies expectations as it summons up the displacement and dehumanization that can come with war."--Kirkus Reviews" . . . deftly explores how people cope with the aftermath of war and the tremendous struggle of rebuilding not only with bricks and concrete but with heart, hopes, and dreams."--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH, and Library Journal"Nothing about reading Hassan Daoud's novels is easy, but the effort is always rewarded. The complex but mundane beauty of his prose is skillfully rendered in Marilyn Booth's translation, The Penguin's Song, a novel as much about the dreary loneliness of daily life as it is about the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Slowly paced, heavy with the burden of waiting, Daoud's text unfolds painstakingly, page after page. The horror of war, the pain of isolation, the longing of unfulfilled desire, and the power of the printed word all shine through in this finely-crafted narrative."--Michelle Hartman, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill UniversityAs war wreaks havoc on the historic heart of Beirut, tenants of the old city are pushed to the margins and obliged to live on the surrounding hillsides, where it seems they will stay forever, waiting. The dream of return becomes a way of life in the unending time of war."The Penguin" is a physically deformed young man who lives with his aging mother and father in one of the "temporary" buildings. His father spends his days on the balcony of their apartment, looking at the far-off city and pining for his lost way of life. Mother and father both find their purpose each day in worrying about the future for their son, while he spends his time in an erotic fantasy world, centered on a young woman who lives in the apartment below. Poverty and family crisis go hand in hand as the young man struggles with his isolation and unfulfilled sexual longing.Voted "The Best Arabic Novel of the Year" when it was first published, The Penguin's Song is a finely wrought parable of how one can live out an entire life in the dream of returning to another.By Philip Gulley. 2001
Stories from a Place That Feels Like Home Master storyteller Philip Gulley envelops readers in an almost…
forgotten world of plainspoken and honest small-town values evoking a simpler time when people knew each other by name folks looked out for their neighbors and people were willing to do what was right--no matter the cost When Philip Gulley began writing newsletter essays for the twelve members of his Quaker meeting in Indiana he had no idea one of them would find its way to radio commentator Paul Harvey Jr and be read on the air to 24 million people Fourteen books later with more than a million books in print Gulley still entertains as well as inspires from his small-town front porchBy Kathleen Daisy Miller. 2014
In a linked collection that presents the secreted small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves…
into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by borderline-abusive sex; Owen, "The Shitblood Man," who, lost in the woods, loses himself in a fit of rage; a receptionist and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.Praise for All Saints"Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group-parishioners, priest, passersby-but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections. All Saints is a moving and soulful book."-Caroline AddersonBy Sau-Ling Wong, Hualing Nieh. 1981
This extraordinary novel tells the story of two women-Mulberry and Peach-who are really one. Mulberry is a young Chinese-American woman…
who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or to resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she copes by developing a second personality: the fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance. These two women-both in flight-speak to their readers through an innovative narrative structure, combining journal entries, interior dialogue, letters, poetry, and myth. Mulberry's past-mainly her experiences during the Japanese occupation of China and the years of civil war between Communists and Nationalists-haunts the text. Separated from her family, she seeks refuge in the home of wealthy cousins, who try desperately to maintain their rigid traditions as warrign forces close in around Peking and the house is systematically looted. Mulberry escapes downriver in a boat carrying a strange assortiment of refugees. But her escape to Taiwan only brings new terrors: when her new husband is targeted by the police, Mulberry msut go into hiding with him in a tiny attic room. There her young daughterm who cannot remember life "outside", descends into a fantasy world of her own invention and unwittingly ensures her family's doom, Mulberry's journal entires alternate with a series of letters from Peach to "the man from the USA immigration service." Peach has embarked on a cross-country journey in flight from possible deportation. Pregnant and penniless, she lives by her wits while taunting her pursuers and ridiculing her alter ego Mulberry, whom she seeks, finally, to conquer. In Mulberry and Peach Hualing Nieh offers a rare perspective, through the eyes of a young refugee woman, of the upheavals of contemporary China (where the book was banned upon its first publication in 1976). Through her experimental, highly effective narrative, she also presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.By Barbara K. Richardson. 2012
"Tributary is a novel whose characters and time are so well inhabited, whose landscapes are so lovingly evoked, we wonder…
if Richardson is not speaking to us directly from the late 19th century, from a high bench above the Great Salt Lake. The language and writing are surefooted and fresh and often startling the way the best poetry can be startling. Richardson is a new American voice worth listening to."-Peter Heller, author of The Painter and The Dog StarsWinner of the 2013 WILLA Literary Finalist AwardWilla Cather and Sandra Dallas resonate in Barbara K. Richardson's fearless portrait of 1870s Mormon Utah. This smart and lively novel tracks the extraordinary life of one woman who dares resist communal salvation in order to find her own."Richardson takes readers back to 1870 Utah for this tale of strength and survival. Raised as a Mormon, our hero Clair Martin travels to the American South, through Shoshone country, and back to Utah."-The Denver Post"Richardson, whose Mormon ancestors settled in the northern Salt Lake Valley, offers a complete portrait of life in the American West by exploring the struggles of a woman living outside the centers of power. Engaging and beautifully written, Tributary is a welcome addition to the current conversation."-5280 Magazine"As wild and isolating as the determined, defiant Clair, the prairies and mountain ranges seduce both narrator and reader. Richardson has created rich, memorable characters."-High Country News"A quest to belong is the theme of this novel from Richardson, whose lyrical prose and heartfelt characters shine through. This novel has much to offer, including a balanced perspective on a controversial time in Mormon history, but its greatest gift is its wisdom about finding one's own path."-Publishers Weekly"This is a gorgeous novel. This book does what art should do, which is to show us our lives with renewed clarity and better insight. Tributary takes the incomplete history and mythos of the West to task, and instead shows us some of the far more interesting and unexplored stories of the American West-Mormonism, racism, women who don't need marriage or men. Beautifully written and engaging, this is a story of one woman and her refusal to cave into societal norms in order to seek her own difficult and inspired path."-Laura Pritchett, author of Stars Go Blue"You'll love resolute Clair Martin, the equal of any man-or religion. Clair's strength and survival are the heritage of western women."-Sandra Dallas, author of True Sisters."Tributary is a remarkable odyssey of the American West, told in one of the most clear-sighted, unjudging, and original voices I've come across in years."-Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek"Seldom does a novel come along that is as beautifully written and emotionally honest as Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson captures the grandeur and harshness of the Old West in a young woman's struggle to find a home and a family without losing herself. A lyrical and haunting story not to be missed."-Margaret Coel, author of Buffalo Bill's Dead Now"From polygamist Mormon desert settlements to the yellow fever-plagued Gulf to an Idaho sheep ranch, Richardson evokes the 19th Century West and the human heart in all their complexity."-Barbara Wright, author of the Spur Award-winning novel Plain LanguageBy David Lindsay-Abaire. 2011
"A lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives. . . . Mr. Lindsay-Abaire…
has shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves."--The New York Times With his latest play Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire returns to Manhattan Theatre Club where four of his previous works were produced, including his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole. The play premiered there in winter 2011 in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan (who also directed Rabbit Hole), and featuring Frances McDormand in the role of protagonist Margie Walsh. Good People is set in South Boston, the blue-collar neighborhood where Lindsay-Abaire himself grew up: Margie Walsh, let go from yet another job and facing eviction, decides to appeal to an old flame who has made good and left his Southie past behind. Lindsay-Abaire offers us both his "quiet three-dimensional depth" (Los Angeles Times) and his carefully observed humor in this exploration of life in America when you're on your last dollar. David Lindsay-Abaire is the author of Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo, A Devil Inside, Wonder of the World, and Rabbit Hole, in addition to the book for the musicals High Fidelity and Shrek. His plays have been produced throughout the United States and around the world.