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CarryOnBooks – Vend at Home!
In the summer of 2018, the CarryOnBooks vending machine was available at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. In partnership with Nieuport Aviation, the machine was accessible to all airport visitors and featured a rotation of titles for sale. You can browse the machine’s selection on this page.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 30 results
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A Thousand Consolations
$22.00Moving, entertaining, and witty, A Thousand Consolations is a literary romantic comedy for fans of David Nicholls’s Us and Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers.
Paula doesn’t put much faith in the candles she designs for her customers, which promise to cure everything from unrequited love to ingrown toenails; it’s just a business she started after her husband’s untimely death put an end to their joint dream of a career on the stage. Believing she may have somehow contributed to Teddy’s illness, Paula is too crippled by guilt to pursue the dream of acting on her own, and too bitter to believe she’ll ever be happy again.
Then she meets Héctor, a former concert pianist seeking refuge from the Mexican narcos who severed his fingers and threatened worse. With great charm and wit, Héctor seduces her into believing in a life in which hope coexists with disappointment, happiness with loss. Paula begins to believe that love is a possibility after all. But will Héctor be allowed to remain in Canada, or be sent back to an unknown fate?
A Thousand Consolations is a surprisingly funny novel in which virtuosity, philosophy, and humour endure despite the modern blights of refugee politics and the threat of narcoterrorism.
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An Extraordinary Destiny
$19.95It’s 1947 in Lahore, and the Sharma family is forced to flee their home during the violence of the Partition of India. As the train tracks measure the ever-growing distance between Varoon and his mother, who vanished during the panic to escape, the boy is thrust towards an uncertain future.
Forty years later, Varoon’s grown son, Anush, desperately tries to disentangle himself from his father’s demands, which are mired in grief and whiskey. Compounding the pressure is an unusually auspicious kundali—a Vedic birth chart—which threatens to suffocate Anush with lofty expectations. But when he meets Nasreen, he feels he may finally be experiencing the incredible fate foretold. Until his father interferes and blocks his chance at true happiness.
Threading artfully through three generations of an Indian family, An Extraordinary Destiny crafts an intricate narrative that reveals, in layers, how decades-old grief rooted in the trauma of history, and couched in familial duty and custom, threaten to sever the sacred connection between ancestors and descendants.
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Bearskin Diary
$21.95Raw and honest, Bearskin Diary gives voice to a generation of First Nations women who have always been silenced, at a time when movements like Idle No More call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Carol Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.Taken from the arms of her mother as soon as she was born, Sandy was only one of over twenty thousand Aboriginal children scooped up by the federal government between the 1960s and 1980s. Sandy was adopted by a Ukrainian family and grew up as the only First Nations child in a town of white people. Ostracized by everyone around her and tired of being different, at the early age of five she tried to scrub the brown off her skin. But she was never sent back into the foster system, and for that she considers herself lucky.From this tragic period in her personal life and in Canadian history, Sandy does not emerge unscathed, but she emerges strong–finding her way by embracing the First Nations culture that the Sixties Scoop had tried to deny. Those very roots allow Sandy to overcome the discriminations that she suffers every day from her co-workers, from strangers and sometimes even from herself.
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Blood Fable
$20.00Winner of the 2018 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Maine, 1980. A utopian community is on the verge of collapse. The charismatic leader’s authority teeters as his followers come to realize they’ve been exploited for too long. To make matters worse, the eleven-year-old son of one adherent learns that his mother has cancer.
Taking refuge in his imagination, the boy begins to speak of another time and place. His parents believe he is remembering his own life before birth. This memory, a story within the story of Blood Fable, is an epic tale about the search for a lost city refracted through the lens of the adventures the boy loves to read. But strangely, as the world around them falls apart, he and his parents find that his story seems to foretell the events unfolding in their present lives.
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Burning in This Midnight Dream
$20.00A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.
Many of the poems in Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.
Halfe’s poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.
Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples’ Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe.
“Burning in this Midnight Dream honours the witness of a singular experience, Halfe’s experience, that many others of kin and clan experienced. Halfe descends into personal and cultural darkness with the care of a master story-teller and gives story voice to mourning. By giving voice to shame, confusion, injustice Halfe begins to reclaim a history. It is the start of a larger dialogue than what is contained in the pages.” –Raymond Souster Award jury citation
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carried away on the crest of a wave
$16.95From the shore of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand to a suburb in Utah to a mysterious Kafkaesque hole in the ground, carried away on the crest of a wave gives us brief glimpses into the lives of a sphinx-like escort, a grieving father, a conflicted priest, brothers of legend, a felonious housewife, an accountant of time, an orphaned boy, a radio shock jock and a man who finds things. Each are connected, primarily, by the cataclysmic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of over a quarter million people. In a series of vignettes, carried away on the crest of a wave illustrates the ripple effect of one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history and ponders what happens when the events that bind us together are the same events that tear us apart.
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Edge of Wild
$19.95Transplanted from New York City to the tiny mountain town of Waterton, Alberta with the task of saving a floundering new hotel, Rich Evans is desperate to return to the city as soon as he can. The locals seem unusually hostile towards his efforts, or maybe even menacing, and was that a cougar on his door-step last night? As Rich begins to wonder whether his predecessor disappeared of his own accord, he finds himself strongly drawn to Louise Newman, the garage mechanic who is fixing his suddenly unreliable BMW, and the only person in Waterton who doesn’t seem desperate to run him out of town. As Rich works on the hotel, the town is torn apart by a series of gruesome, unsolved murders. With Louise as his only ally in a town that seems set against him, Rich can’t help but wonder: will he be the next victim?
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Encountering Riel
$19.95Willie Lorimer is a young poetry student who forgot to resign his commission in the Canadian militia. When he is called up to join the fight against the Métis rebel leader, Louis Riel, Willie is scared, but bolstered by his own naïveté. The journey to the heart of the rebellion is long and full of anguish. When the militia reach the West, things go tragically wrong, and their once-heroic cause is marred by the cynical realities of politics, and the harsh realities of war.
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How Black Mothers Say I Love You
$17.95From the author of the blockbuster hit ‘da Kink in my hair comes an emotional and raw look into family dynamics, trust, resolution and change.
Claudette still can’t forgive her mother for leaving. For six years of her childhood, Claudette and her sister Valerie were left with their grandmother while their mother, Daphne, moved from Jamaica to the United States to start a new chapter for their family. But in that time, Daphne remarried and had another daughter.
Claudette, now in her late thirties, travels to visit her dying mother in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t stop her anger and abandonment issues from bubbling up. It doesn’t stop Daphne from voicing her opinions on how Claudette lives her life, either. With Daphne, Claudette, and Valerie all under one roof again, each family member is forced to confront their emotions while there’s still time.
Though rooted in buried strife and sadness, How Black Mothers Say I Love You is full of humour, love and tenderness as it explores the complicated perceptions of immigrant mothers.
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Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl
$17.95Iskotew Iskwew/Fire Woman is a poetry collection written during a period of trauma while the author was working as a Counsel to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. This book is about memories and experience growing up on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in northern Saskatchewan in the 1980s: summers spent on the land and the pain of residential school. With this collection, the author wants to teach and inform Canadians of her experiences growing up as an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. She believes it is important to share her stories for others to read.
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It’s Only the Himalayas
$19.95A laugh-out-loud travel memoir that reveals backpacking’s awkward side.
Sue, a disenchanted waitress, embarks upon a year-long quest around the world with her friend, Sara—who’s exasperatingly perfect. Expecting a whimsical jaunt of self-discovery, Sue instead encounters an absurd series of misadventures that render her embarrassed, terrified, and queasy (and in a lot of trouble with Philippine Airlines).
Whether she’s fleeing from ravenous lions, dancing amid smoking skulls, trekking Annapurna underprepared, or (accidentally) drugging an Englishman, Sue’s quick-witted, self-deprecating narrative might just inspire you to take your own chaotic adventure.
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Kalyna
$19.95Swept up in a whirlwind courtship, Katja and Wasyl begin life anew in a Ukrainian settlement of Western Canada. The dusty Canadian prairies promise hope and independence, but when war breaks out between the old world and the new, their newfound stability is shattered. Rumours of the internment of Ukrainian-Canadians haunt the new settlers. Would the country they love betray them like this? An incident throws the couple and their young children into turmoil, and Katja faces the prospect of enduring a Canadian winter without Wasyl by her side. The close community of Edna-Star bands together during this trying time, but the help of the suave Dr. Smith holds its own danger. Will the closely-knit family be able to weather this separation, or will they be reunited before all hope is lost?
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League of the Star
$19.95At the dawn of the French revolution, masses of hungry peasants burn the chateaux of aristocrats throughout France. After the death of his estranged family, an 18 year-old nobleman, the Marquis Marcel de la Croix, is forced to raise the royalist banner, despite his own revolutionary leanings. The wreck of his family fortress becomes a bastion for newly disenfranchised aristocrats, and Marcel and his fiery associate, Pierre Lafont, lead a rebel group called the League of the Star. After a bitter falling out with Lafont, Marcel escapes to England incognito, hoping to put the past behind him. In England he encounters several French emigres: the large, brutish former soldier, M. Tolouse, the haughty Mlle. de Courteline, and the sheltered Mlle. Vallon. As these traveling exiles are forced together, a young boy in their company begins to intrigue them with a mysterious tale of love. Can a simple love story, begun merely to entertain the weary travellers, hold the key to Marcel’s fate?
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Mary Green
$19.95Mary Green, obscure orphan and ward of the wealthy Hargreaves family, has always accepted her inferior position with grace, humility, and gratitude. When she discovers that her only friend is to leave the country forever, that her confidence has been betrayed by the unfeeling youngest daughter of the family, and that her very deprivation is the object of the mockery and scorn of everyone she has sought to honour, she determines to cast them off and make her own way in the world. On her twenty-first birthday, free to choose her own destiny, she dreams of peace and tolerance, and perhaps a partner who might be noble enough to love her in all her simplicity. But when an unexpected foray into London society disrupts all her plans, she is faced with an uncharacteristic storm of feelings. Will she grow strong and happy in her independence, or will her character be lost amidst her newfound ambition? Unable to trust the whims of her own heart, Mary is forced to confront the question that has forever plagued her: Who is she and where does she come from?
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My Conversations With Canadians
$20.00Shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award
Shortlisted for the First Nation Communities READ 2018-2019 AwardOn her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice and reconciliation, to name a few, are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians.
In essays that are both conversational and direct, Maracle seeks not to provide any answers to these questions she has lived with for so long. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she has had as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and grandmother over the course of her life. Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer’s own history and a reimagining of the future of our nation.
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No Fury Like That
$22.95No Fury Like That is a literary thriller about life and death–and the power of second chances. What is your moral compass? Julia Redner has to die in order to find her answer to this question–but is she really dead or is she being given the opportunity to rethink her life while solving an intricate puzzle of murders? And she does not miss the opportunity to exact righteous revenge! With an unforgettable cast of characters, a surprising plot with twists and turns, and a powerful, determined female protagonist, the novel takes you on a fast-paced, funny, adventurous ride, exploring themes of love, friendship, revenge and family–and the transformation of character in impossible circumstances. Ultimately, No Fury Like That is about metamorphosis, and how friendship is more important than success, love is more important than money, and family is more important than power.