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Spring 1989. Three young people leave their far-flung birthplaces to follow their own songs of migration. Each ends up in Montreal, each on a voyage of self-discovery, dealing with the mishaps of heartbreak and the twisted branches of their shared family tree. Filled with humor, charm, and good storytelling, this novel shows the surprising links between cartography, garbage-obsessed archeologists, pirates past and present, a mysterious book with no cover, and a broken compass whose needle obstinately points to the Aleutian village of Nikolski (a minuscule village inhabited by thirty-six people, five thousand sheep, and an indeterminate number of dogs).
From the author of Canada Reads winner Nikolski comes a sweet, smart and occasionally surreal romantic comedy, featuring two young friends who could become lovers—if only one of them hadn't convinced herself that the end of the world is nigh. The Randall family was always a little strange. For generations, each member receives a prophetic vision of the apocalypse—but always on a different date. When the End of Days fails to materialize, yet another Randall goes mad. In the summer of 1989, Hope Randall's mother, in an attempt to forestall the latest imminent apocalypse, loads up the Lada and heads west from Yarmouth. After their car dies in Rivière-du-Loup, the mother and daughter put do...
A funny and fast-paced novel about obsession and adventure, science experiments and parakeets, coding and container ships, Six Degrees of Freedom won the Governor General's Literary Award in its original French. Nicolas Dickner is a previous winner of Canada Reads for the novel Nikolski. "Brilliant, beautiful and poetic with moments of pure reading pleasure! You read it with a smile on your lips--it's a book that makes you happy." --Anne Michaud, Bernier et Cie, Radio-Canada Three characters, infinite paths to freedom... Lisa is a young woman whose longing for adventure is tethered by the demands of an eccentric mother and a father slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Lisa's friend Éric is an agoraphobic hacker who becomes independently wealthy before his eighteenth birthday. And Jay is a former computer pirate who's paying her debt to society, day by stultifying day, working for the RCMP in Montreal. But when Jay learns of the existence of the mysterious shipping container Papa Zulu, she begins a clandestine investigation to discover who made it disappear and what they are trying to hide.
Boy meets girl and... boom! The boy falls hopelessly in love and secretly harbours hopes for their romantic future. And the girl? Well, the girl is fully convinced that there is no future at all: not just for them, but for the entire planet. Moving between Canada and Japan, between solid ground and flights of the surreal, this is the sweet, surprising story of two people travelling from friendship to romance, and from separation to the possibility of reunion.
Selected as the 2010 CBC Canada Reads Winner! Awards for the French-language edition: Prix des libraires 2006 Prix littéraire des collégiens 2006 Prix Anne-Hébert 2006 (Best first book) Prix Printemps des Lecteurs–Lavinal Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolski charts the curious and unexpected courses of personal migration, and shows how they just might eventually lead us to home. In the spring of 1989, three young people, born thousands of miles apart, each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what - or who - might anchor them in their lives. They each leave almost everything behind, carrying with them only a few artefacts of their...
By offering an analysis of the idea of home across the individual, interpersonal, social, and global scales, Mapping Home aims to show the extent to which self-concept is deeply tied to constructions of home in a globally mobile age. The epistemological link between dwelling as "knowing oneself" and the experience of welcome as key to being able to map "one's place(s) in the world" are examined through Martin Heidegger's concept of dwelling, Zygmunt Bauman's notion of liquid modernity, Jacques Derrida's exploration of hostile hospitality, and Kwame Anthony Appiah's sense of cosmopolitanism as border-crossing conversation. To further explore these ideas, the book draws on multimodal literatur...
Appeared on best of the year lists from The New York Times, The Guardian, and more! Winner of The Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of the Year! Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War—a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history. Beginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim emphasizes Lee’s strength in overcoming...
Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers. The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring attraction of an old technology for readers, community organizers, and government agencies, exploring the social practices inspired by the sharing of books in public spaces and revealing the complex ideological investments made by readers, cultural workers, institutions, and the mass media in the meanings of reading.
In this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life ...
A sparkling, inventive debut novel inspired by Sir John Franklin's grand — but ultimately failed — quest to discover the Northwest Passage and by his extraordinary wife, Lady Jane. Originally published in Quebec as Du bon usage des etoiles, Dominique Fortier's debut On the Proper Use of Stars is as fresh and imaginative as anything published in recent years. It weaves together the voices of Francis Crozier, Sir John Franklin's second in command, who turns a sceptical eye on the grandiose ambitions and hubris of his leader, and of Lady Jane Franklin and her niece Sophia, both driven to uncommon actions by love and by frustration as months then years pass with no word from the expedition. Fortier skilfully accents the main narratives with overheard conversations and snippets from letters and documents that bring two entirely different worlds — the frozen Arctic and busy Victorian London — alive.