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Songs for the end of the world: A novel
By Saleema Nawaz. 2020
"In these dark days, Saleema Nawaz dares to write of hope. Songs for the End of the World is a…
loving, vivid, tenderly felt novel about men, women, and a possible apocalypse. I couldn't put it down." — Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors and The Wagers INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER. An immersive, deeply engaging, and hopeful novel about the power of human connection in a time of crisis, as the bonds of love, family, and duty are tested by an impending pandemic. Named a "Book You Should Read This Summer" by Maclean's and Chatelaine. How quickly he'd forgotten a fundamental truth: the closer you got to the heart of a calamity, the more resilience there was to be found. This is the story of a handful of people who find themselves living through an unfolding catastrophe. Elliot is a first responder in New York, a man running from past failures and struggling to do the right thing. Emma is a pregnant singer preparing to headline a benefit concert for victims of the outbreak—all while questioning what kind of world her child is coming into. Owen is the author of a bestselling plague novel with eerie similarities to the real-life pandemic. As fact and fiction begin to blur, he must decide whether his lifelong instinct for self-preservation has been worth the cost. As the novel moves back and forth in time, we discover these characters' ties to one another—and to those whose lives intersect with theirs—in an extraordinary web of connection and community that reveals none of us is ever truly alone. Linking them all is the mystery of the so-called ARAMIS Girl, a woman at the first infection site whose unknown identity and whereabouts cause a furor. Written and revised between 2013 and 2019, and brilliantly told by an unforgettable chorus of voices, Saleema Nawaz's glittering novel is a moving and hopeful meditation on what we owe to ourselves and to each other. It reminds us that disaster can bring out the best in people—and that coming together may be what saves us in the end
Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories
By Shashi Bhat. 2024
From the Governor General’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection…
about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away. A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.
real ones: a novel
By katherena vermette. 2024
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face…
their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a "pretendian." Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.
Call me al
By Wali Shah. 2024
Ali is an eighth-grade kid with a lot going on. Between the pressure from his immigrant parents to ace every…
class, his crush on Melissa, who lives in the rich area of town while he and his family live in a shabby apartment complex, and trying his best to fit in with his friends, he feels like he's being pulled in too many different directions. But harder still, Ali is becoming increasingly aware of the racism around him. Comments from his friends about Pakistani food or his skin color are passed off as jokes, but he doesn't find them funny. And when Ramadan starts, Ali doesn't tell anyone he's fasting because it just seems easier. Luckily he finds solace in putting his feelings into words-and poems. But his father is dead set against him using art as a distraction when he's got schoolwork and a future career as a doctor to focus on. Ali's world changes when he, his mom and his little brother are assaulted by some racist teens. Ali must come to terms with his roiling feelings about his place in the world, as a Pakistani immigrant, a Muslim and a teenager with his whole life ahead of him. With help from his grandfather, an inspiring teacher and his friend, Ali leans on his words for strength. And eventually he finds his true voice
And the Walls Came Down
By Denise Da Costa. 2023
A troubled Delia Ellis returns to her old neighbourhood, Don Mount Court, to retrieve a beloved childhood diary. While the…
entries uncover significant revelations around her mother’s past, it's Delia’s return home that leads to a true understanding of the circumstances that forged her identity.
Goddess Crown
By Shade Lapite. 2023
Kalothia has grown up in the shadows of her kingdom, hidden away in the forested East after her parents were…
outed as enemies of the king. Raised in a woodland idyll by a few kindly adult caretakers, Kalothia can hunt and fish and fend for herself but knows little of the outside world. When assassins attack her home on her sixteenth birthday, she must flee to the king’s court in the West—a beautiful but lethal nest of poison, plots, and danger, overseen by an entrenched patriarchy. Guided by the Goddess herself, can Kalothia navigate this most worldly of places to find her own role? What if she must choose between her country and her heart? Excitement, romance, and a charismatic heroine shine in this first book set in the unforgettable kingdom of Galla.
Bad houses
By John Elizabeth Stintzi. 2025
A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humourous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Kelly Link From…
John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales. In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses , a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind. Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes
Songs for the End of the World: A Novel
By Saleema Nawaz. 2020
"In these dark days, Saleema Nawaz dares to write of hope. Songs for the End of the World is a…
loving, vivid, tenderly felt novel about men, women, and a possible apocalypse. I couldn't put it down." -- Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors and The WagersFrom the award-winning, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of Bone and Bread comes a spellbinding and immersive novel about the power of community and the triumph of human connection, as the bonds of love, family, and duty are tested by an impending pandemic.How quickly he'd forgotten a fundamental truth: the closer you got to the heart of a calamity, the more resilience there was to be found. This is the story of a handful of people who find themselves living through an unfolding catastrophe. Elliot is a first responder in New York, a man running from past failures and struggling to do the right thing. Emma is a pregnant singer preparing to headline a benefit concert for victims of the outbreak--all while questioning what kind of world her child is coming into. Owen is the author of a bestselling plague novel with eerie similarities to the real-life pandemic. As fact and fiction begin to blur, he must decide whether his lifelong instinct for self-preservation has been worth the cost. As the novel moves back and forth in time, we discover these characters' ties to one another and to those whose lives intersect with theirs, in an extraordinary web of connection and community that reveals none of us is ever truly alone. Linking them all is the mystery of the so-called ARAMIS Girl, a woman at the first infection site whose unknown identity and whereabouts cause a furor. Written and revised between 2013 and 2019, and brilliantly told by an unforgettable chorus of voices, Saleema Nawaz's glittering novel is a moving and hopeful meditation on what we owe to ourselves and to each other. It reminds us that disaster can bring out the best in people--and that coming together may be what saves us in the end.
real ones: a novel
By katherena vermette. 2024
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face…
their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she&’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.But then into lyn and June&’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a &“pretendian.&” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn&’t Métis.
And the Walls Came Down
By Denise Da Costa. 2023
“A scintillating debut full of nuanced and achingly human characters.” — Zalika Reid-Benta, author of Frying PlantainBack in the low-income…
neighbourhood where she was raised, a young woman rediscovers the importance of community, home, and finding one’s voice.Just before the demolition of her childhood home in east Toronto, Delia Ellis returns to retrieve her beloved diary. Using it as a compass, she rediscovers life as a precocious teen growing up in the nineties.Delia’s writings reveal her anxieties following a move to Don Mount Court, a Toronto government housing complex, where she struggles to navigate life with an overprotective Jamaican mother and her father’s inept replacement, “Neville the nuisance.” Delia’s troubles compound when she enlists her naive younger sister in a scheme to reunite their parents and recapture the idealistic life she yearns for.Yet, through the lens of adulthood, Delia’s entries take a wrecking ball to the perception of her parents’ love story she’d long built up in her mind, uncovering a child’s internalization of a failed marriage, poverty, and a mother come undone.
Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories
By Shashi Bhat. 2024
From the Governor General&’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday…
trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.What would have happened if she&’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away. A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man&’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend&’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman&’s relationships with others and with herself.
On the Bright Side
By Null Anna Sortino. 2024
A hopeful novel about love, disability, and the inevitability of change by the author of Give Me a Sign.&“Poignant, romantic,…
and deeply heartfelt.&” —Amber Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Way I Used to BeEllie&’s Deaf boarding school just shut down, forcing her to leave the place she considered home and return to her hearing family. But being mainstreamed into public school isn't exactly easy. So her guidance counselor pairs her with Jackson, a student who&’s supposed to help her adjust. Can the boy who tries to say the right things, and gets it all wrong, be the lifeline Ellie needs?Jackson has been avoiding his teammates ever since some numbness in his legs cost them an important soccer match. With his senior year off to a lonely start, he&’s intrigued when he&’s asked to help the new girl, initially thinking it will be a commendable move on his part. Little does he know Ellie will soon be the person he wants most by his side when the strange symptoms he&’s experiencing amount to a life-changing diagnosis.Exploring what it means to build community, Anna Sortino pens a story about the fear of the unknown and the beauty of the unexpected, all wrapped up in a poignant romance that will break your heart and put it back together again."Tender, honest, and utterly human." —Adib Khorram, award-winning author of Darius the Great Is Not Okay