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You Told Us: Fave Canadian Reads from 2021-22
Usually on our birthdays we talk about our favourite reads, but this year, we turned it over to you, our readers. See what books ALU readers loved over the last year.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 33 results
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Semi-Detached
Semi-Detached
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Setting Fire to Water
$24.95Shifting restlessly from dark to light and back again, written in lithe, precise prose, the stories in Phoebe Tsang’s Setting Fire to Water illuminate the lives of those who exist inside otherness.
A young Asian woman, an artistic over-achiever turned drifter, endures a mind-bending night of reckoning as she struggles to find her way “home,” careening between flirtation and thievery, dream and memory. A reality TV star obsesses about the real stain that blemishes the set of her fake, made-for-TV life. A modern fairytale is told from the point of view of a fox having an argument with its enemy, hunger. A heart-broken accountant goes on a pilgrimage to India to get his fire back, and his attempt to ask for mercy from the most holy of rivers fizzles like his former fiancée’s tepid devotion.
These seventeen stories unfold outside the Canadian mainstream, where longing—for home, for love, for artistic achievement, for spiritual fulfillment—is a given, and acceptance—of self, of the knowability of others, of the limits to knowing—is always in question. Using unconventional storylines and slippages in time and space, these stories explore the mystical possibilities inherent in contemporary life. -
Shamus the Urban Rez Dog, P.I.
Shamus the Urban Rez Dog, P.I.
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Sins of the Daughter
Sins of the Daughter
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Slow Reveal
$22.95“A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” wrote French poet Paul Valéry, an outcome echoed in the ten year on/off extramarital affair between Katharine, a film editor and Naomi, a lesbian poet. Set in New York in the 90s, art, addiction and family dysfunction culminate in Katharine’s attempt to reconcile her marriage. When her love for the poet prevails, she must face the confrontations with her two grown daughters, a visual artist and an aspiring writer, mired in addiction.
Art is front and centre in the novel. The forces that work against us, as we long to love and be loved, are the forces that work against us as we confront the artistic process. The artist’s struggle to reach the potential in her work parallels the struggle for intimacy to reach the potential in her relationships. In the final analysis, the artistic process is as risky, messy and unpredictable as building intimacy and trust in love.
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Some Unfinished Business
Some Unfinished Business
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Standing on Neptune
Standing on Neptune
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Straggle
$20.00In this wide-ranging collection of essays Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about just who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. Deer move mysteriously through these essays, knowing just when they vanish from sight, as do predators, both human and animal. She walks to begin to understand the place she now calls home in Southern Ontario, catalogues the fauna around her in FaunaWatch and continues walking through illness. From a child spotting a snowy owl on her way to school in Winnipeg, to a young woman watching her own distinctive walk be imitated in an acting class, to a worried daughter helping her mother relearn how to walk after a bad fall on a busy road, MacDonald shares how walking has shaped her life and the lives of many others. Wry, smart, political and lyrical, these essays share the joy of walking as well its danger and uncovers the promise it offers – of healing, of companionship and of understanding.
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Swept Away
Swept Away
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The Compassionate Imagination
The Compassionate Imagination
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The Sisters Sputnik
$24.95“It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It’s a breezy joy.” — Publishers Weekly
“Together, the Sisters Sputnik are the badassest kickass duo since Tank Girl and Jet Girl. If you like your speculative fiction sardonic, weird, sprightly, and intelligent, you will love this splendid book.” — Candas Jane Dorsey, author of Black Wine and Ice and Other Stories
An odyssey wrapped in a love story, set in a near-future of artificial people
The Sisters Sputnik are a time-traveling trio of storytellers-for-hire who are much in demand throughout the multiverse of 2,052 alternate worlds. Each world was created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Earth Standard Time, home of the Sisters’ leader, aging comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi, her 20-something apprentice Unicorn Girl, and their pop culture–loving AI, Cassandra. Tales of Earth Standard Time-That-Was, from World Wars to the space race to Hollywood celebrities, have turned the Sisters into storytelling rock stars.
In a distant reality where books and music have disappeared, Debbie finds herself in bed with an old Earth Standard Time lover who begs her to tell him a story. Over one long, eventful night, she spins the epic of the Sisters’ adventures in alternate realities, starting with the theft of a book of evil comic strips in a post-pandemic Toronto full of ghost kitchens and robot-worshipping lost children known as junksters, to a disco-era purgatory where synthetic people are sending humans into the past through a reverse-engineered Statue of Liberty, to a version of the 1950s where the Sisters meet a rising star named Frank Sinatra and his girlfriend, the once-and-future Queen of England.
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Tumblehome
$22.95On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.
But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.
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Uncoupling
$12.99Anyone going through separation and divorce can agree that it’s an emotional and financial rollercoaster. There is so much to understand, prepare, read, gather, and act on that it’s an incredibly draining process. Uncoupling: The Ugly Truth about Divorce and Finances is here to help. This book has everything from the basics to the nitty-gritty when it comes to separation and divorce, with an emphasis, of course, on finances.
Along with the stories of people going through their own separations and divorces are the voices of experts covering everything from the specifics of Canada’s Divorce Act and parenting agreements to the tax implications of divorce and financial post-divorce to-dos. Divorce rates in Canada are on the rise and Uncoupling will provide much-needed information for those on this difficult journey.
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Untethered
$12.99During a teenage adventure abroad, twins Petal and Rose find their lives diverging in ways they could not have imagined, highlighting the complexities of their relationship and shrouded family history.
Free-spirited Rose becomes enraptured with the ultra-orthodox community, while Petal delays her schooling to watch over her sister. Saddled with too much responsibility, Petal’s clinical depression manifests in self-destructive behaviour. She finds refuge on a kibbutz, as her sister grows further from her, marrying a man Petal does not deem worthy.
Years later, Petal confronts her prejudices about her sister’s life, her resentment, and the effects of generational trauma on both their lives as she is called back to Toronto from New York City to support Rose during a crisis.
Told through the eyes of two generations, Untethered provides context and insights into orthodoxy, post-war experience, mental illness, generational trauma, and grief while laying the foundations for understanding and a path towards healing.
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Up for Grabs
$9.99Frida wasn’t expecting to find much while digging through relics at her late grandmother’s house. But when she comes across a mysterious painting, family secrets, and a nosy auctioneer, she knows the real digging has just begun.
Frida and her brother, Zac, have lived in seven countries in ten years. In fact, they’ve been traveling for so long that Frida has never considered herself from anywhere — until they inherit their grandmother’s house in Victoria, British Columbia. Now they’re up to their ears in family heirlooms, paintings of dead relatives, vintage paper clips, and ceramic animals.
Then a nosy antique dealer takes an interest in her grandmother’s stuff. A big, sneaking-around-trying-to-break-in-to-the-house kind of interest. Is this strange neighbor looking for something specific? And will Frida and Hazeem figure it out before it’s too late?
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Wan
$24.95Shortlisted for the 2023 Fred Kerner Book Award
A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction of 2022
“Wan is a masterpiece. This beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite novel by Dawn Promislow is a work of utter genius.” – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things
Narrated in a completely distinctive and mesmerizing voice, Wan is the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel.
Written in gorgeous and spare prose, this exquisite debut novel grapples with questions of complicity and guilt, of privilege, and of the immeasurable value of art and of life.