Unwrap ALU Day Two: Battlestar Galactica & Twin Peaks

Everyone has one – that tricky booklover on your list for whom you’re stymied on what to buy. Fret no longer: we’ve rounded up twenty books for hyper-specific people. Check our recommendations, and buy on. BONUS: get a set of our holiday gift cards FREE when you buy any of our featured books.

A twisted, darkly funny and redemptive tale, Emily Saso’s The Weather Inside (Freehand Books) will leave you wondering where the line is drawn between what’s real and what’s imagined, and why Armageddon isn’t always the end of the world. It takes on abuse and fundamentalism and grief and recovery, all the while with incredible wit and humour. Saso also manages a loveably quirky cast of characters, including hilariously perfect details like a neighbour who won Canadian Idol (“the fear in his eyes when he won”) and the (accidental?) theft of a beloved Canadian national treasure.Bradley Somer, author of Fishbowl, says, “By turns gritty and gorgeous, with an underlying raw humour that you almost feel guilt laughing at, the prose herein is constantly compelling and always confronting. Saso has written a challenging relevance in the form of a novel.”***

Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage (BookThug) tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but is dense with threat at the same time. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence and what it feels like to be a girl. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, Double Teenage is a magic spell for getting out of girlhood alive.***We’ve got sixteen more hyper-specific book recommendations over the next few weeks, so stay tuned to see what else made our #unwrapALU book list. And if you missed yesterday’s picky picks, check them out here.(And don’t forget: we had a gift guide last week with even more books for the choosing.)