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Bookville Lists
Browse the books that make up Bookville.
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Bookville 2023 – Drama & Plays
For those with a flair for the dramatic, browse these handpicked Canadian plays! Read a play before you see it, or revisit a favourite.
Bookville 2023 – Fiction
Explore a wide range of Bookville fiction picks: from humorous, beach-ready reads to serious dramas to award-winners, there's something for every type of reader in this collection of fiction books.
Bookville 2023 – Graphic Novels
Who said books with pictures were just for kids? This selection of graphic novels are perfect for the Bookville reader who loves gorgeous, engaging, and fun illustrations alongside a riveting narrative.
Bookville 2023 – Indigenous Lit
Browse Bookville's selection of Indigenous-authored books to get a sense of the diversity of voices and tremendous talent these writers have: perfect for gifting or to read yourself (or both!).
Bookville 2023 – Kids
For the littlest Bookville citizens, browse this selection of Canadian-authored kids books.
Bookville 2023 – Mystery & Crime
There's a mystery afoot in Bookville… and you, sleuthing reader, can help solve it! Browse our selection of whodunits and thrilling crime fiction.
Bookville 2023 – Nonfiction
For the reader who likes fact more than fiction. Memoirs, art books, sports, social justice reads, and more: they're all to be found here among Bookville's nonfiction picks.
Bookville 2023 – Poetry
We at Bookville are proud purveyors of poetry: whether you're new to poetry or a seasoned poetry pro, you'll find beautiful poems with our picks below (that rhymed, didn't it?).
All Books in this Collection
Showing 49–64 of 107 results
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Lonely Boys
$27.95What can be done about the friendships that are bound to break your heart?After a year of radio silence, Ella bursts back into the lives of her former roommates, Jen and Lucie. Her intentions seem simple enough: she wants to mend fences and regain their trust. But it won’t be that easy. Lonely Boys is a story of friendship, sisterhood and self-affirmation. It captures life at twenty-something as three young women navigate the challenges of work, sex and romantic relationships, all the while trying to hold on to the connection they share despite the hurt it carries.
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Momento
$22.00Why do we stand in front of art and look at it? Why do we go to galleries and museums? What does it feel like? What do you expect to have happen there? How do you feel before you enter, after you leave? What do you do with all your moods, your attentions, your restlessness, your curiosity, your sense of time? How does a visit come to be in the way that a painting comes to be? Does it matter how you begin? Does it matter if you’re ready? Jeffery Donaldson’s Momento answers these questions and more by offering a poetic daydream about the curious, otherworldly, but urgent and existential experience of art, artifacts, and the buildings that house them. This little book itself is like a visit to a museum. Enter and wander as you please.
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My Indian
$16.95***2022 ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS: APMA BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD – SHORTLIST***
***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – LONGLIST***
***2022-2023 HACKMATACK AWARD: ENGLISH FICTION – SHORTLIST***
***2022 IPPY AWARDS: MULTICULTURAL FICTION: JUV/YA – SILVER***
In 1822, William Epps Cormack sought the expertise of a guide who could lead him across Newfoundland in search of the last remaining Beothuk camps on the island. In his journals, Cormack refers to his guide only as “My Indian.”
Now, almost two hundred years later, Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill reclaim the story of Sylvester Joe, the Mi’kmaw guide engaged by Cormack. In a remarkable feat of historical fiction, My Indian follows Sylvester Joe from his birth (in what is now known as Miawpukek First Nation) and early life in his community to his journey across the island with Cormack. But will Sylvester Joe lead Cormack to the Beothuk, or will he protect the Beothuk and lead his colonial explorer away?
In rewriting the narrative of Cormack’s journey from the perspective of his Mi’kmaw guide, My Indian reclaims Sylvester Joe’s identity.
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My Left Skate
$15.95FINALIST, Red Cedar Nonfiction Award
Based on extensive interviews, My Left Skate: The Extraordinary Story of Eliezer Sherbatov is a first-person biography of a Jewish teenager who had it all on the hockey rink: guts, drive, and exceptional talent. When a freak accident leaves him with a permanent disability and no feeling below his left knee, everyone believes Eliezer’s career is over – everyone except his mother, a professional power skating coach. She teaches Eliezer to skate using the muscles in his upper leg, and after two and a half years of operations and rehabilitation, he returns to the rink to become one of Quebec’s elite junior players.
Still undrafted at age nineteen, Eliezer embarks on a professional career in Europe in the hopes of one day returning to the NHL. His travels lead him to France, Kazakhstan, Slovakia, and to Poland, where he lives and plays hockey just a few kilometres from the Auschwitz death camp, haunted by memories of the past.
In its stunning conclusion, My Left Skate describes Eliezer’s life in Ukraine and his struggle to escape from war after Russia invades the very region in which he plays.
“Eliezer Sherbatov scores a hat trick with  My Left Skate . This story is wonderfully told: gritty, inspiring, joyful at times and sad at other moments. He deserves to be a hockey hero for all that he has survived.” - Marty Klinkenberg,  The Globe and Mail -
My Mother, My Translator
$22.95In 2008, Jaspreet Singh made a pact with his mother. He would gladly give her the go-ahead to publish her significantly altered translation of a story from his collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, if she promised to write her memoirs. After she died in 2012, he decided to take up the memoir she had started. My Mother, My Translator is a deeply personal exploration of a complex relationship. It is a family history, a work of mourning, a meditation on storytelling and silences, and a reckoning with trauma–the inherited trauma of the 1947 Partition of India and the direct trauma of the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence Singh experienced as a teenager.
Tracing the men and especially the women of his family from the 1918 pandemic through the calamitous events of Partition, My Mother, My Translator takes us through Singh’s childhood in Kashmir and with his grandparents in Indian Punjab to his arrival in Canada in 1990 to study the sciences, up to the closing moments of 2020, as he tries to locate new forms of stories for living in a present marked by COVID-19 and climate crisis.
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My Privilege, My Responsibility
$24.95Finalist, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction
Finalist, Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
In September 2015, Sheila North was declared the Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), the first woman elected to the position. Known as a “bridge builder”, North is a member of Bunibonibee Cree Nation. North’s work in advocacy journalism, communications, and economic development harnessed her passion for drawing focus to systemic racism faced by Indigenous women and girls. She is the creator of the widely used hashtag #MMIW. In her memoir, Sheila North shares the stories of the events that shaped her, and the violence that nearly stood in the way of her achieving her dreams. Through perseverance and resilience, she not only survived, she flourished. -
My Sister’s Girlfriend
$13.95Fifth grader Talia Cohen-Sullivan isn’t sure how she feels about boys, crushes, and the love thing even though her best friend, Carmen, is already dreaming about kissing–and it’s only September. Losing her mom to cancer a few years ago made Talia afraid of change, though she still has her big sister, Jade, to help her through hard times. But when she sees Jade kissing a girl, Talia is suddenly thrust into a world she doesn’t understand and faces important decisions. With the help of her therapist, and Carmen, and Jade herself, Talia learns that love has many faces; love might even be something she’s interested in soon . . . for herself.
Teacher resources available on publisher website:https://www.rebelmountainpress.com/my-sisters-girlfriend–teacher-resources.html
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Night Work
$20.00A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story in the “intense, moody, contradictory” character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
– from “One of You”In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs’s poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.
This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.
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Northern Wildflower
$23.00Northern Wildflower is the beautifully written and powerful memoir of Catherine Lafferty. With startling honesty and a distinct voice, Lafferty tells her story of being a Dene woman growing up in Canada’s North and her struggles with intergenerational trauma, discrimination, poverty, addiction, love, and loss. Focusing on the importance of family ties, education, spiritualism, cultural identity, health, happiness, and the courage to speak the truth, Lafferty’s words bring cultural awareness and relativity to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, giving insight into the real issues many Indigenous women face and dispelling misconceptions about what life in the North is like.
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Nunavik
$22.95Author Michel Hellman meets with his editor Luc Bossé and casually promises to write a sequel to his best-selling book Mile End. But the Montréal neighborhood, with its trendy cafés and gluten-free bakeries, doesn’t seem half as inspiring as it used to be. Part memoir and part documentary, Nunavik follows Hellman on a trek through Northern Quebec as he travels to Kuujjuaq, Puvirnituk, Kangiqsujuaq and Kangirsurk, meeting members of the First Nations, activists, hunters and drug dealers along the way. An honest and often funny account of this trip, Nunavik truly feels personal, with the author acknowledging (and challenging) his own prejudices. While the North has had a profound influence on our collective identity as Canadians, it remains an idea – myth rather than reality. Empirical rather than theoretical, Nunavik reflects on the way our relationship to the North has shaped our own cultural landscape.
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Optic Nerve
$22.95*Shortlist 2024 JM Abraham Poetry Award*
Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.
Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.
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Paper Stones
$22.95From the moment she holds her baby niece, Rose is on a mission. Terrified that her baby niece will fall victim to the sexual abuse rampant in the family, Rose tells us in her own warm, funny, down-to-earth voice, how she reluctantly agrees to join a therapy group, hoping she can find out how to prevent disaster and see that baby Jenny grows up unharmed. In the group, she meets new friends who will become like family: Josie, who “sees” the future; Tammy, with a suspicious bruise on her neck; good and steady Marg, whose father is threatening to burn down her apartment house; and sweet, grieving, spiritual Sally. Rose’s own chronic problem, she confesses, is picking wrong men. Josie finds a small magazine picture of a little town in northern Ontario. She sees, with her second sight, a resort hotel to be built in this town and a sunnier life for the group. As they begin to take the first painful steps of emotional recovery, an intense fantasy about this unknown town and dream hotel becomes the secret life of the group. Deep friendships evolve as the women help one another through the roller coasters of their recovery process. Despite setbacks, they cling to their dream of moving up north and running their own hotel.
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Pickles vs. the Zombies
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Pistachios in My Pocket
$24.95Poet Sareh Farmand was born in Tehran at the start of the Islamic Revolution. In this brave first collection of poems and prose a narrative arc details her family’s escape from Iran, detailing their time as immigrants in limbo, and finally, as Landed Immigrants in Canada. Using family anecdotes, memory, public documents, and images to outline her family’s story, Pistachios in my Pocket moves from the personal to the universal by exploring the influences of migration, political strife, and cultural identity on humanity. Here is a new voice to the conversation on global citizenship and multiculturalism, as themes of loss, home, and belonging are explored in a new way through a wide socio-political lens and personal accounts of a family’s unique, yet universal experiences. Ultimately, bringing forward the many ways immigrants are haunted after fleeing for safety and what it means to be Canadian.
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Places Like These
$23.00A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend’s secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter’s poignant short stories reflects each character’s journey.
Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.
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Poetry is Queer
$19.95Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers?real and imagined?conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word ?queer? for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.