ebooks for Everyone Lists

The Seed

$14.95

Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn’t support women struggling to have children

In pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups – where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation – leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.

In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage – her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.

The Sniger and the Floose

By: Ashley Fayth

$13.99

On a very Random Island
in the North Atlantic Sea,
some very Random animals
are hiding in the trees?

So begins Ashley Fayth?s delightful nonsense poem in which readers meet a range of ?wild and wondrous? beasts?like the sniger, the floose, the squiffin, and the butterflabbit. With its playful rhymes and rollicking rhythm, this book is a perfect read-aloud. Yet even in its silliest moments, The Sniger and the Floose is a gentle reminder to respect and preserve the beauty of the natural world around us, and a joyous celebration of imagination.

The Supreme Orchestra

By: David Turgeon

$19.95

A motley crew of characters deftly woven into a brilliant mashup of the spy novel and the art-world parody.
We know how Simone met the man who will become, for a time, her fourth husband. We know what she does (artist), her friends (a veritable menagerie), her habits (frustrated homebody). What remains to learn are the things she still doesn’t fully understand herself, like her role in the affair of the Port Merveille diamond. The Supreme Orchestra is many things at once: a geopolitical thriller, an art-world exposé, a digressive social study, a mischievous parody.

The Sweetest One

By: Melanie Mah

Cosmopolitan and curious seventeen-year-old Chrysler Wong suffers from a debilitating fear brought on by belief in a family curse. Three of her siblings have died after turning eighteen and venturing beyond the borders of their tiny rural Alberta town, and the fourth, her favourite, has recently left and is incommunicado. Is she destined to share their fate – or worse, doomed to live a circumscribed life?

The Tender Birds

By: Carole Giangrande

$22.95

Winner of the 2020 IPPY Silver Medal for Literary Fiction; Winner, 2020 The Miramichi Reader’s “Very Best” Book Awards for Fiction

Matthew Reilly is a busy academic, a lonely priest haunted by secrets. Young Alison is the shy and devoted keeper of Daisy, a falcon which suffered an accident and can no longer fly. The three of them meet in a Boston parish, but Matt has forgotten a momentary but disturbing meetup with Alison, homeless eight years earlier in Toronto. Close to exhaustion, he’s forced to reflect on what’s become of his life, including the loss of a son that no one knew he’d fathered. Alison and Matt had a fateful encounter during her homeless period, but Matt doesn’t connect that frail teenager with the healthy young woman she’d become. It’s left to Alison to uncover Matt’s past and for Matt to come to terms with it.

The Three-Legged Fox

By: Carol Dahlstrom

$24.95

Middle-aged Jane Barken discovers a lump in her left breast. Five years after treatment she is depressed, her marriage is falling apart, and her singing career is faltering. Recuperating at her Willow Island cottage, Jane decides to embark on a canoe trip around the island. She uncovers a section of the island no one has ever visited and what she finds there is horrifying. Fraught with desperation and only a modicum of resources available to her she must face her darkest fears in order to reclaim her life.

The Ticking Heart

By: Andrew Kaufman

$19.95

Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria.

One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband’s missing heart. In fact, she’s so insistent that she replaces Charlie’s heart with a bomb. He has twenty-four hours to find Twiggy Miller’s heart – and its meaning – or his own will explode.

Tender and brutal, optimistic and despairing, this modern fable by the author of the cult hit All My Friends Are Superheroes takes a fresh look at what it means to fall into, and out of, love.

The Tiffin

By: Mahtab Narsimhan

The Trouble with Brunch

By: Shawn Micallef

$13.95

One of The Globe and Mail’s Globe 100: Best Books of 2014

Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outrÃ© food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch andother forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class.

Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was obliviousto its own instability and insularity.

The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it’s also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn’t so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it’s that brunch could be so much more.Â

‘At the crux of it, Micallef’s issue with brunch is a lack of self-awareness, and his book is essentially a call to arms to consider the implications of one’s actions, even for something as innocuous as meeting friends for eggs and mimosas.’

– Bookslut

Praise for Shawn Micallef:

‘As Toronto grows into a more mature, more compelling city, a new group of non-academic, street-smart urbanists has emerged to appreciate it – with-it young writers, architects and men and women about town who love big cities and see things in Toronto that most of usmiss. Shawn Micallef is one of the sharpest of this sharp-eyed breed.’

– Globe and Mail

‘A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.’

– Douglas Coupland [on Stroll]

$16.95

In a post-apocalyptic world, Bern and Elena are exiled from their village. Their crime? The two women are no longer of child-bearing age.

Forced to rely upon traditional wisdom for their survival, Elena and Bern retreat from the remains of civilization to a freezing, desolate landscape where they attempt to continue their lives after the end of the world. When a charismatic stranger from the village arrives seeking their aid, the women must decide whether they will use their knowledge of the past to give the society that rejected them the chance at a future.

The Unravelling

By: Clem Martini, Olivier Martini

$23.95

A memoir, told through illustrations and text, of one family’s journey through mental illness, dementia, caregiving, and the health care system.

Olivier Martini and his mother, Catherine, have lived together since he was diagnosed with schizophrenia thirty-six years ago. It hasn’t always been a perfect living situation, but it’s worked — Catherine has been able to help Olivier through the ups and downs of living with a mental illness, and Olivier has been able to care for his aging mother as her mobility becomes limited, and Olivier’s brothers Clem and Nic have been able to provide support to both as well. But then Olivier experiences a health crisis at the exact same time that his mother starts slipping into dementia.

The Martini family’s lifelong struggle with mental illness is suddenly complicated immeasurably as they begin to navigate the convoluted world of assisted living and long-term care. With anger, dry humour, and hope, The Unravelling tells the story of one family’s journey with mental illness, dementia, and caregiving, through a poignant graphic narrative from Olivier accompanied by text from his brother, award-winning playwright and novelist Clem Martini.

The Very Marrow of Our Bones

By: Christine Higdon

$18.95

Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing.

Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . .

Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running — and forgetting — lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret.

Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.

The Virgin Trial

By: Kate Hennig

$17.95

Fifteen-year-old Bess has no idea when she heads to London to see her Uncle Ted that she is about to find herself at the heart of a scandal involving sexual impropriety; her stepfather, Thom; and an attempted overthrow of the government. What does all this have to do with her? How adroitly can Bess manoeuvre through a series of interviews to avoid being swept up in the peril that might ensue? And will she be able to spin the facts to create a myth based on her own innocence?

In this gripping follow-up to The Last Wife, Kate Hennig continues her Tudor Queens Trilogy by cleverly exploring victim shaming, sexual consent, and the extraordinary ability of girls becoming women as she reimagines the scandalous and little-known story of Elizabeth the First before she was Queen.

The Wall and the Wind

By: Veselina Tomova

$10.95

In the middle of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe, a young girl dreams of adventures near and far. One day, a huge wall appears that separates East from West, and dreamer from dreams. No ladder is high enough, no tunnel deep enough to get past that wall. But then a crack appears in the wall, and the girl (now a woman) knows she has the chance to follow her dreams again.

The Ward Uncovered

$27.95

In early 2015, a team of archaeologists began digging test trenches on a non-descript parking lot next to Toronto City Hall — a site designated to become a major new court house. What they discovered was the rich buried history of an enclave that was part of The Ward — that dense, poor, but vibrant ‘arrival city’ that took shape between the 1840s and the 1950s. Home to waves of immigrants and refugees — Irish, African-Americans, Italians, eastern European Jews, and Chinese — The Ward was stigmatized for decades by Toronto’s politicians and residents, and eventually razed to make way for New City Hall. The archaeologists who excavated the lot, led by co-editor Holly Martelle, discovered almost half a million artifacts — a spectacular collection of household items, tools, toys, shoes, musical instruments, bottles, industrial objects, food scraps, luxury items, and even a pre-contact Indigenous projectile point. Martelle’s team also unearthed the foundations of a nineteenth-century Black church, a Russian synagogue, early-twentieth-century factories, cisterns, privies, wooden drains, and even row houses built by formerly enslaved African Americans. Following on the heels of the immensely popular The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood, which told the stories of some of the people who lived there, The Ward Uncovered digs up the tales of things, using these well-preserved artifacts to tell a different set of stories about life in this long-forgotten and much-maligned neighbourhood.

Contributors include Abbey Flower, Sarah Hood, Ron Williamson, Cheryl Thompson, Peter Popkin, Arlene Chan, Karolyn Smardz Frost, Simon Rogers, Liz Driver, Vid Ingelvics, Bethany Good, Adrienne Chambon, Kathy Grant, Guylaine Petrin, Craig Heron, Tom Porawski, Wayne Reeves, Wenh-In Ng, Ellen Scheinberg, Nicole Brandon, Rosemary Sadlier, Matt Beaudoin, Natasha Henry, and Heather Murray.

The Water Beetles

By: Michael Kaan

$22.95

Winner, 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, 2018 McNally Robinson Book of the Year, and 2018 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2017 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and 2018 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
A National Post Best Book of 2017
A Walter Scott Prize Academy Recommended Historical Novel of 2017
On CBC Books’ list of writers to watch in 2018

The Leung family leads a life of secluded luxury in Hong Kong. But in December 1941, the Empire of Japan invades the colony. The family is quickly dragged into a spiral of violence, repression, and starvation. To survive, they entomb themselves and their friends in the Leung mansion. But this is only a temporary reprieve, and the Leungs are forced to send their children away.

The youngest boy, Chung-Man, escapes with some of his siblings, and together they travel deep into the countryside to avoid the Japanese invaders. Thrown into a new world, Chung-Man befriends a young couple who yearn to break free of their rural life. But their friendship ends when the Japanese arrive, and Chung-Man is once again taken captive. Unwittingly and willingly, he enters a new cycle of violence and punishment, until he finally breaks free from his captors and returns to Hong Kong.

Deeply scarred, Chung-Man drifts along respectfully and dutifully, enveloped by the unspoken vestiges of war. It is only as he leaves home once again — this time for university in America — that he finally glimpses a way to keep living with his troubled and divided self.

Written in restrained, yet beautiful and affecting prose, The Water Beetles is an engrossing story of adventure and survival. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of the author’s father, this mesmerizing story captures the horror of war, through the eyes of a child, with unsettling and unerring grace.

The Weight of the Heart

By: Theresa Kishkan

$14.95

When her brother dies in the turbulent water of B.C.’s Thompson River, Isabel sets out to find traces of him in the places he loved. At the same time, she is seeking locations referenced in important literary works by Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson for a graduate thesis. Her map becomes a cartography of both feminine and personal engagements with landscape and memory. In locating the sources of rich creative expression and by reaching back to ancient ceremonial rituals for death and the afterlife, she finds a way to reconcile her own grief and the writing of B.C’s early feminist writers whom she fears risk being forgotten.

The Western Light

By: Susan Swan

The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan’s long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary “Mouse” Bradford. Mouse’s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father — the admired country doctor — is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.

Enter Gentleman John Pilkie, the former NHL star who’s transferred to the mental hospital in Midland, where he is to serve out his life-sentence for the murder of his wife and daughter. John becomes a point of fascination for young Mary, who looks to him for the attention she does not receive from her father. He, in turn, is kind to her — but the kindness is misunderstood. When Mary figures out that the attention she receives from the Hockey Killer is different in kind and intent from the attention her Aunt Little Louie receives, her world collapses. Set against the beautiful and dramatic shores of Georgian Bay, the climax will have readers turning pages with concern for characters they can’t help but love.

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