Book Club
University of Winnipeg Library Book Club Lists - motivating reading, thought, and discussion beyond regular academic studies
About Amnesty International Book Club
- About Amnesty International Book ClubThe Amnesty Book Club was started in January 2014, to encourage Canadians to read good books and become more involved in human rights.
2021 Book Selections
The Skin We're In by
In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a bracing, provocative and perspective-shifting book from one of Canada's most celebrated and uncompromising writers, Desmond Cole. The Skin We're In will spark a national conversation, influence policy and inspire activists.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) F 1035 A1 C654 2020ISBN: 9780385686341Publication Date: 2020
The Dime Box by
Buried secrets lie closest to the heart. Greta Giffen barely escaped being murdered by the man she grew up with. She's not sure who Ian is, or who she is, but she's determined to find out. When she bolts from their secluded cabin in northern Ontario and flees to Toronto, her new life comes at a price. Ian dies under suspicious circumstances and a veteran detective believes eighteen-year-old Greta has the perfect motive. A prime suspect in a tense police investigation, Greta finds it hard to make Detective Astra Perez believe the details of her dark and appalling story. Digging deep into her sordid history and forced to face the people from her past in a new light, Greta struggles to accept the secrets that have haunted her since childhood. Still, Detective Perez remains doubtful. And until Greta herself confronts the disturbing evidence in front of her, she will never truly escape that cabin in the woods.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781913206239Publication Date: 2019
How to Pronounce Knife by
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, this revelatory story collection honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." A failed boxer painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. A mother teaching her daughter the art of worm harvesting. In her stunning debut story collection, O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to belong. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. As one of Thammavongsa's characters says, "All we wanted was to live." And in these stories, they do--brightly, ferociously, unforgettably. Unsentimental yet tender, taut and visceral, How to Pronounce Knife announces Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most striking voices of her generation. "As the daughter of refugees, I'm able to finally see myself in stories." --Angela So, Electric Literature
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9780316422130Publication Date: 2020
We Have Always Been Here by
Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9780735235007Publication Date: 2019
2020 Book Selections
All of Us in Our Own Lives by
A beautiful story of strangers who shape each other's lives in fateful ways, All of Us in Our Own Lives delves deeply into the lives of women and men in Nepal and into the world of international aid. Ava Berriden, a Canadian lawyer, quits her corporate job in Toronto to move to Nepal, from where she was adopted as a baby. There she struggles to adapt to her new career in international aid and forge a connection with the country of her birth. Ava's work brings her into contact with Indira Sharma, who has ambitions of becoming the first Nepali woman director of a NGO; Sapana Karki, a bright young teenager living a small village; and Gyanu, Sapana's brother, who has returned home from Dubai to settle his sister's future after their father's death. Their journeys collide in unexpected ways. All of Us in Our Own Lives is a stunning, keenly observant novel about human interconnectedness, about privilege, and about the ethics of international aid (the earnestness and idealism and yet its cynical, moneyed nature).
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781988298344Publication Date: 2018
Aria by
An extraordinary, cinematic saga of rags-to-riches-to-revolution that follows an orphan girl coming of age in Iran at a time of dramatic upheaval It is the 1950s in a restless Iran, a country rich in oil but deeply divided by class and religion. The government is unpopular and corrupt and under foreign sway. One night, an illiterate army driver hears the pitiful cry of a baby abandoned in an alley and menaced by ravenous wild dogs. He snatches up the child and takes her home, naming her Aria--the first step on an unlikely path from deprivation to privilege. Over the next two decades, the orphan girl acquires three mother figures whose secrets she will learn only much later: reckless and self-absorbed Zahra, who abuses her; wealthy and compassionate Fereshteh, who adopts her; and mysterious Mehri, whose connection to Aria is both a blessing and a burden. A university education opens a new world to Aria, and she is soon caught up in the excitement and danger of the popular uprising against the Shah that sweeps through the streets of Tehran. The novel's heart-pounding, explosive finale sees the Ayatollah Khomeini's brutal regime seize power--even as Aria falls in love and becomes a mother herself. Nazanine Hozar's stunning debut gives us an unusually intimate view of a momentous time, through the eyes of a young woman coming to terms with the mysteries of her own past and future.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781524749033Publication Date: 2020
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781612198668Publication Date: 2020
All We Knew but Couldn't Say by
Finalist for the 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Nonfiction Joanne Vannicola grew up in a violent home with a physically abusive father and a mother who had no sexual boundaries. After being pressured to leave home at fourteen, and after fifteen years of estrangement, Joanne learns that her mother is dying. Compelled to reconnect, she visits with her, unearthing a trove of devastating secrets. Joanne relates her journey from child performer to Emmy Award-winning actor, from hiding in the closet to embracing her own sexuality, from conflicted daughter and sibling to independent woman. All We Knew But Couldn't Say is a testament to survival, love, and the belief that it is possible to love the broken, and to love fully, even with a broken heart.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781459744240Publication Date: 2019
Good Citizens Need Not Fear by
"Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch"--Margaret Atwood "These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy...Reva's characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess--hope."--O, The Oprah Magazine A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single crumbling apartment building in Ukraine. A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's "darkly hilarious" (Anthony Doerr) intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In "Bone Music," an agoraphobic recluse survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen X-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, just as his parents, not seen since he was a small child, supposedly were. Weaving the narratives together is the unforgettable, chameleon-like Zaya: a cleft-lipped orphan in "Little Rabbit," a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR," a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern Bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming." Good Citizens Need Not Fear tacks from moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's Tsar of Love and Techno to a "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews) collection that is "fearless and thrilling" (Bret Anthony Johnston), and as clever as it is heartfelt. "You've never read anything like them"--Elizabeth McCracken
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9780385545297Publication Date: 2020
Seven by
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 TRILLIUM AWARD * FINALIST FOR THE 2021 EVERGREEN AWARD * AN INDIGO BEST BOOK OF 2020 * A GLOBE AND MAILBEST INDEPENDENT READ FOR FALL 2020 * AN APPLE BOOKS BEST BOOK OF 2020 * A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2020 * A NOW MAGAZINE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2020 "Be prepared for this novel to stay with you for a long time, especially its ending."--GLOBE AND MAIL"[An] extraordinary book... packed with discovery and jarring emotional arcs."--TORONTO STAR"Penetrating and subtle ... [An] immersive, absorbing portrait."--EDEN ROBINSON"Explores with courage and storytelling finesse the harsh truths within the ideals of kinship and community." --DAVID CHARIANDY"An urgent and passionate read." --VIVEK SHRAYA"Visceral and emotional... a courageous feat."--QUILL & QUIRE (starred review)A brave, soulfully written feminist novel about inheritance and resistance that tests the balance between kinship and the fight against customs that harm us.When Sharifa accompanies her husband on a marriage-saving trip to India in 2016, she thinks that she's going to research her great-great-grandfather, a wealthy business leader and philanthropist. What captures her imagination is not his rags-to-riches story, but the mystery of his four wives, missing from the family lore. She ends up excavating much more than she had imagined.Sharifa's trip coincides with a time of unrest within her insular and conservative religious community, and there is no escaping its politics. A group of feminists is speaking out against khatna, an age-old ritual they insist is female genital cutting. Sharifa's two favourite cousins are on opposite sides of the debate and she seeks a middle ground. As the issue heats up, Sharifa discovers an unexpected truth and is forced to take a position.
Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781459746398Publication Date: 2020-09-05
2019 Book Selections
Vi by
"Canada Reads-winner Kim Thúy returns with Vi, once more exploring the lives, loves and struggles of Vietnamese refugees as they reinvent themselves in new lands. The youngest of four children and the only girl, Vi was given a name that meant "precious, tiny one," destined to be cosseted and protected, the family's little treasure. Daughter of an enterprising mother and a wealthy and spoiled father who never had to grow up, the Vietnam war tears their family asunder. While Vi and many of her family members escape, her father stays behind, and her family must fend for themselves in Canada. While her mother and brothers put down roots, life has different plans for Vi. As a young woman, she finds the world opening up to her. Taken under the wing of Hà, a worldly family friend and diplomat lover, Vi tests personal boundaries and crosses international ones, letting the winds of life buffet her. From Saigon to Montreal, from Suzhou to Boston to the fall of the Berlin Wall, she is witness to the immensity of the world, the intricate fabric of humanity, the complexity of love, the infinite possibilities before her. Ever the quiet observer, somehow she must find a way to finally take her place in the world."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PQ3919.3.T48 V513 2018ISBN: 9780735272804Publication Date: 2016
The Boat People by
"In the tradition of Lawrence Hill's The Illegal, Chris Cleave's Little Bee, and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and inspired by a real incident, this high-stakes and increasingly timely novel powerfully evokes what it means to leave behind everything you have ever known to seek out a better life in a strange land. When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and 500 fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father believes the struggles that he and his six-year-old son have long faced are finally over. But their journey has only just begun. The group is thrown into a detention processing centre, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among "the boat people" are members of a separtist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks--and that these insurgents now pose a threat to Canada's national security. As the refugees are subjected to heavy interrogation, Mahindan fears that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son's chance for asylum. Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan-Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Set in Vancouver, with riveting scenes in civil war-torn Sri Lanka, the novel asks difficult but necessary questions that will continue to be relevant as the world-wide crisis remains a reality for years to come."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PR9199.4.B3565 B63 2018ISBN: 9780771024290Publication Date: 2018
The right to be cold : one woman's story of protecting her culture, the Arctic and the whole planet by
The Arctic ice is receding each year, but just as irreplaceable is the culture, the wisdom that has allowed the Inuit to thrive in the Far North for so long. And it's not just the Arctic. The whole world is changing in dangerous, unpredictable ways. Sheila Watt-Cloutier has devoted her life to protecting what is threatened and nurturing what has been wounded. In this culmination of Watt-Cloutier's regional, national, and international work over the last twenty-five years, The Right to Be Cold explores the parallels between safeguarding the Arctic and the survival of Inuit culture, of which her own background is such an extraordinary example. This is a human story of resilience, commitment, and survival told from the unique vantage point of an Inuk woman who, in spite of many obstacles, rose from humble beginnings in the Arctic to become one of the most influential and decorated environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) GE 56 W28A3 2015ISBN: 9780670067107Publication Date: 2015
Prisoner of Tehran by
Nemat tells the heart-pounding story of her life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of Ayatollah Khomeinis brutal Islamic Revolution--arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) DS 318.84 N46A3 2007ISBN: 9780143052173Publication Date: 2007
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8635 I246 M66 2018ISBN: 9781770414006Publication Date: 2018
2018 Book Selections
Brown Girl in the Ring by
"She's a powerful writer with an imagination that most of us would kill for. I have read everything she has written and am in awe of her many gifts. And her protagonists are unforgettable--formidable haunted women drawn with an almost unbearable honesty." --Junot Diaz BROWN GIRL IN THE RING The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways--farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8565 O63B76 1996ISBN: 9780446674331Publication Date: 1998
Brother by
Story of the sons of Trinidadian immigrants and their struggle to battle against prejudices and live a better life.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8605 H3685 B76 2017ISBN: 9780771022906Publication Date: 2017
Seven Fallen Feathers by
Finalist, 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalist, 2017 Speaker's Book Award Finalist, 2018 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction In 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death on the railway tracks after running away from residential school. An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied. More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau's grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang's. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. Reggie Bushie's death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada's long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities. A portion of each sale of Seven Fallen Feathers will go to the Dennis Franklin Cromarty Memorial Fund, set up in 1994 to financially assist Nishnawbe Aski Nation students' studies in Thunder Bay and at post-secondary institutions.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) E 78 O5T35 2017ISBN: 9781487002268Publication Date: 2017
Scarborough by
Trillium Book Award and City of Toronto Book Award finalist; Edmund White Debut Fiction Award finalist; A Globe 100, National Post and Quill and Quire Best Book of the Year; Longlisted for Canada Reads Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education. And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father's mental illness; Sylvie,Bing's best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father. Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locatesits dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8615 E75 S23 2017ISBN: 9781551526775Publication Date: 2017
The Break by
2017 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Literature Finalist Winner, Amazon.ca First Novel Award Winner, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction Winner, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award Winner, McNally Robinson Book of the Year A Canada Reads 2017 finalist National Bestseller 2016 Governor General's Literary Award Finalist 2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist National Post 99 Best Books of the Year CBC Best Canadian Debut Novels 2016 Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of 2016 Quill & Quire Book of the Year Kobo Best Books of the Year Walrus Magazine The Best Books of 2016 49th Shelf Books of the Year When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break -- a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house -- she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim -- police, family, and friends -- tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou, a social worker, grapples with the departure of her live-in boyfriend. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister Rain. Paulina, a single mother, struggles to trust her new partner. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre. Officer Scott, a Métis policeman, feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city. Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg's North End is exposed. A powerful intergenerational family saga, The Break showcases Vermette's abundant writing talent and positions her as an exciting new voice in Canadian literature.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8643 E74B74 2016ISBN: 9781487001117Publication Date: 2018
A Fine Balance by
A portrait of India featuring four characters. Two are tailors who are forcibly sterilized, one is a student who emigrates, and the fourth is a widowed seamstress who decides to hang on. A tale of cruelty, political thuggery and despair by an Indian from Toronto, author of Such a Long Journey.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8576 I83F5 2002ISBN: 0771034806Publication Date: 2002
2017 Book Selections
A Recipe for Bees by
An engaging heroine's quest for love and independence are combined in this novel filled with bee lore.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8551 N3574R4 1998ISBN: 9780676971002Publication Date: 1998
Laughing All the Way to the Mosque by
Zarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She's just as likely to be agonizing over which sparkly earrings will "pimp out" her hijab as to be flirting with the Walmart meat manager in a futile attempt to secure halal chicken the day before Eid. Little Mosque on the Prairie brought Zarqa's own laugh-out-loud take on her everyday culture clash to viewers around the world. And now, in Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, she tells the sometimes absurd, sometimes challenging, always funny stories of being Zarqa in a western society. From explaining to the plumber why the toilet must be within sitting arm's reach of the water tap (hint: it involves a watering can and a Muslim obsession with cleanliness "down there") to urging the electrician to place an eye-height electrical socket for her father-in-law's epilepsy-inducing light-up picture of the Kaaba, Zarqa paints a hilarious portrait of growing up in a household where, according to her father, the Quran says it's okay to eat at McDonald's, but only if you order the McFish.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PN 1992.4 N29A3 2015ISBN: 9781443416931Publication Date: 2014
419 by
This story unveils the brilliant layers of a Nigerian cyberspace sting that brings devastation to an entire family.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8561 E75F68 2013ISBN: 9780670064717Publication Date: 2012
Funny Boy by
Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, Funny Boy, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Arjie Chelvaratnam, at the age of 7, prefers dressing up in a sari and playing bride-bride with his girl cousins to cricket. When he is discovered by the adults engaging in this innocent fun, he is forced out of the world of the girls. A lonely outsider, he attaches himself to various sympathetic adults, whose own trajectories and dilemmas reveal to Arjie the difficulties of following one’s desires. As the novel progresses, the civil violence and tensions mount bringing devastating consequences to Arjie’s family and their sheltered world.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8587 E383F85 1994ISBN: 9780771079504Publication Date: 1994
Monkey Beach by
As Lisamarie travels by speedboat, five hundred miles north of Vancouver, searching for her drowned brother's body, she recounts her life which has included visits by ghosts and shapeshifters and tormenting premonitions.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8585 O248M6 2000ISBN: 9780676970753Publication Date: 2000
Medicine Walk by
"A novel about the role of stories in our lives, those we tell ourselves about ourselves and those we agree to live by." --Globe and Mail When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death, decimated from years of drinking. The two undertake difficult journey into the mountainous backcountry, in search of a place for Eldon to die and be buried in the warrior way. As they travel, Eldon tells his son the story of his own life--from an impoverished childhood to combat in the Korean War and his shell-shocked return. Through the fog of pain, Eldon relates to his son these desolate moments, as well as his life's fleeting but nonetheless crucial moments of happiness and hope, the sacrifices made in the name of love. And in telling his story, Eldon offers his son a world the boy has never seen, a history he has never known.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8595 A324M43 2016ISBN: 9781571311153Publication Date: 2015
The Adventures of Claire Never-Ending by
Claire ripples between generations of women, carried as a middle name within one family, in this very special story of magic, pregnancy, adventure and love never ending. Meet Amelia Claire Earl in the present day as she discovers she's pregnant just before flying around the world in her hot air balloon; move backward in time and meet her mother, Liz, in 1980, two months pregnant and fighting-off ghosts; then onto 1958 where Dorothy, Liz's mother, is three months pregnant and running through the forest in chase of a snowy owl; and so forth through the generations to end in 1826 as the ninth and original Claire sails over to conquer the 'new world'. Expect wanderlust, postcards, mother-in-laws, heart break, middle names, witchcraft, ancestors, sore backs, hunger strikes, best friends, husbands, independence, and heaps of courage in this story of Claire Never Ending.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8603 R86A65 2013ISBN: 9780973752526Publication Date: 2013
2015 Book Selections
Indian Horse by
Saul Indian Horse is in trouble, and there seems to be only one way out. As he journeys his way back through his life as a northern Ojibway, from the horrors of residential school to his triumphs on the hockey rink, he must question everything he knows.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8595 A324I64 2012ISBN: 9781553654025Publication Date: 2012
Sunday by the Pool in Kigali by
Follows the lives of an eclectic group of individuals who frequent a hotel swimming pool in a Rwandan town including Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian journalist. As the two slide into a love affair, civil unrest in Rwanda makes insidious progress, engulfing the people around the pool in the chaos of civil war.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PQ 3919.2 C686D513 2003ISBN: 9781877008672Publication Date: 2003
Sweetland by
The scarcely populated town of Sweetland rests on the shore of a remote Canadian island. Its slow decline finally reaches a head when the mainland government offers each islander a generous resettlement package--the sole stipulation being that everyone must leave. Fierce and enigmatic Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors founded the village, is the only one to refuse. As he watches his neighbors abandon the island, he recalls the town's rugged history and its eccentric cast of characters.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8555 R84S94 2015ISBN: 9780385663168Publication Date: 2014
The Handmaid's Tale by Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8551 T86H3 2006ISBN: 9780771008740Publication Date: 2006
China Dog by
The arrival of a pretty mail-order bride from China creates tensions between two brothers....An elderly woman surprises her children by making a new life for herself....A young Chinese-Canadian woman wonders how to tell her family that she has secretly married her white boyfriend....Surprising, poignant and often hilarious, the stories of China Dog and Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry delve into the layers of submerged desire and fear that lie beneath the surface of ordinary lives. They bring vividly to life a host of Chinese immigrants, from the turn of the century to the present day. Some are trying to adjust to life in a strange and hostile new land. Others are trying to live Western lives while accomodating the wishes of their more traditional families. All learn that some of the truths they've built their lives around are illusions that can shatter as easily as a china dog.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8553 A827C45 2002ISBN: 9781896705309Publication Date: 1998
The Purchase by
"In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, a young Quaker father and widower, leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life. He sets out with two horses, a wagonful of belongings, his five children, a 15-year-old orphan wife, and a few land warrants for his future homestead. When Daniel suddenly trades a horse for a young slave, Onesimus, it sets in motion a struggle in his conscience that will taint his life forever, and sets in motion a chain of events that lead to two murders and the family's strange relationship with a runaway slave named Bett."--Publisher's website.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 3569 P3386P87 2014ISBN: 9780771079351Publication Date: 2012
Beatrice and Virgil by
When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled further into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey--named Beatrice and Virgil--and the epic journey they undertake together. With all the spirit and originality that made Life of Pi so beloved, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity. nbsp;
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8576 A7829B43 2011ISBN: 9780812981544Publication Date: 2011
Secret Daughter by
Somer’s life is everything sheimagined it would be—she’snewly married and has startedher career as a physician in SanFrancisco—until she makes the devastatingdiscovery she never will beable to have children. The same year in India, a poormother makes the heartbreakingchoice to save her newborn daughter’slife by giving her away. It is adecision that will haunt Kavita forthe rest of her life, and cause aripple effect that travels across theworld and back again. Asha, adopted out of a Mumbaiorphanage, is the child that bindsthe destinies of these two women. Wefollow both families, invisibly connecteduntil Asha’s journey of self-discoveryleads her back to India. Compulsively readable anddeeply touching, Secret Daughter isa story of the unforeseen ways inwhich our choices and families affectour lives, and the indelible power oflove in all its many forms.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 3607 O896S43 2011ISBN: 9780061928352Publication Date: 2011
The Inconvenient Indian by
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada-U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. Suffused with wit, anger, perception, and wisdom, The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be "Indian" in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: "The issue has always been land." With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America--broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes--sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) E 77 K566 2013ISBN: 9780816689767Publication Date: 2013
2016 Book Selections
Dogs at the Perimeter by
Summary:
A Montreal woman searches for her friend, Hiroji, a neurologist, and the story of his and his brother's past unlocks buried memories of Cambodia, of her separation from her family under the Khmer Rouge, and her harrowing journey of escape from the "rehabilitation" camp where her mother and brother were taken with others.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8589 H534D64 2011ISBN: 9780771084089Publication Date: 2011
Station Eleven by
"One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet"--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8626 A53S73 2015ISBN: 9781443434867Publication Date: 2014
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor by
The epic true story of Charlotte Taylor, as told by her great-great-great-granddaughter, one of Canada's foremost journalists. In 1775, twenty-year-old Charlotte Taylor fled her English country house with her lover, the family's black butler. To escape the fury of her father, they boarded a ship for the West Indies, but ten days after reaching shore, Charlotte's lover died of yellow fever, leaving her alone and pregnant in Jamaica. Undaunted, Charlotte swiftly made an alliance with a British naval commodore, who plied a trading route between the islands and British North America, and travelled north with him. She landed at the Baie de Chaleur, in what is present-day New Brunswick, where she found refuge with the Mi' kmaq and birthed her baby. In the sixty-six years that followed, she would have three husbands, nine more children and a lifelong relationship with an aboriginal man. Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history, walking the same paths as the expelled Acadians, the privateers of the British-American War and the newly arriving Loyalists. In a rough and beautiful landscape, she struggled to clear and claim land, and battled the devastating epidemics that stalked her growing family. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Charlotte Taylor's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sally Armstrong, reclaims the life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with all the drama and sweep of a novel. Excerpt from from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor: Every summer of my youth, we would travel from the family cottage at Youghall Beach to visit my mother's extended clan in Tabusintac near theMiramichi River. And at every gathering, just as much as there would be chickens to chase and newly cut hay to leap in, so there would be an ample serving of stories about Charlotte Taylor. . . She was a woman with a past. The potboilers about her ran like serials from summer to summer, at weddings and funerals and whenever the clan came together. She wasn't exactly presented as a gentlewoman, although it was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England. Nor was there much that seemed genteel about the person they always referred to as old Charlotte. Words like lover and land grabber drifted down from the supper table to where we kids sat on the floor. There were whoops of laughter at her indiscretions, followed by sideways glances at us. But for all the stories passed around, it was clear the family still had a powerful respect for a woman long dead. We owed our very existence to her, and the anecdotes the older generation told suggested that their own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember, I've tried to imagine the real life Charlotte Taylor lived and, more, how she ever survived.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8601 R595N55 2008ISBN: 9780679314042Publication Date: 2007
The illegal : a novel by
A literary thriller that addresses the fate of undocumented refugees who struggle to survive in nations that do not want them. Keita Ali is on the run. He is desperate to flee Zantoroland, a mountainous black island that produces the fastest marathoners in the world. Keita signs on with notorious marathon agent, Anton Hamm, who provides Keita with a chance to run the Boston marathon. But when Keita fails to place among the top finishers, rather than being sent back to his own country, he goes into hiding.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8565 I3535I45 2016ISBN: 9781554683833Publication Date: 2015
The Afterlife of Stars by
In the waning months of 1956, while Russian tanks roll into the public squares of Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee with their family to the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina. As they travel through minefields both real and imagined, Robert and Attila grapple with sibling rivalry, family secrets, and incalculable loss to arrive at a place they thought they'd lost forever: home.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8571 E4766A64 2014ISBN: 9780143191483Publication Date: 2014
Lives of Girls and Women by Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8576 U57L58 1974Publication Date: 1974
For Today I am a Boy by
Peter Huang, a Chinese Canadian and only son in his family, struggles with his inner desires to be a girl while his father tries to map out his future in a very masculine way. Peter deals with various types of people as they react to his desires and choices, while he struggling to live the life his father expects of him.
Call Number: Main Stack (UW) PS 8611 U14F67 2014ISBN: 1443412643Publication Date: 2014
Room by
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE -- nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer. Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8557 O559R66 2011ISBN: 9780316098335Publication Date: 2010
Prairie Ostrich by
Not every story has a happy ending. Since her brother's death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful. The Murakami family is not happy. But in the hands of Tamai Kobayashi, their story becomes a drama of rare insight and virtuosity. Weighing physical, cultural, and emotional isolation against the backdrop of schoolyard battles and adult mysteries, Kobayashi paints a compelling portrait of a feisty and endearing outsider. As Kathy's final year in high school counts down to an uncertain future, the indomitable Egg sits quiet witness to her unravelling family as she tries to find her place in a bewildering world.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8571 O3123P73 2014ISBN: 9780864926807Publication Date: 2014
2014 Book Selections
Three day road by
... It is 1919 and Niska, an Oji-Cree medicine woman, has left her home in the bush of northern Ontario to recieve Xavier Bird, her only relation who has returned from the trenches of Europe. Gravely wounded and addicted to morphine, Xavier recounts how he and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, prowled the battlefields as snipers of enormous skill and how the circumstances of their deadly craft led them to very different fates. Told with unblinking focus, this is a stunning tale of brutality, survival, and rebirth that marks the arrival of a prodigious new talent." From the bookjacket.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8553 O9358T47 2006ISBN: 9780143056959Publication Date: 2005
Half-Blood Blues by
The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8609 D84H35 2011ISBN: 9780887627415Publication Date: 2011
The Cellist of Sarajevo by
A spare and haunting, wise and beautiful novel about the endurance of the human spirit and the subtle ways individuals reclaim their humanity in a city ravaged by war. In a city under siege, four people whose lives have been upended are ultimately reminded of what it is to be human. From his window, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbors waiting in a breadline. Then, in a flash, they are killed by a mortar attack. In an act of defiance, the man picks up his cello and decides to play at the site of the shelling for twenty-two days, honoring their memory. Elsewhere, a young man leaves home to collect drinking water for his family and, in the face of danger, must weigh the value of generosity against selfish survivalism. A third man, older, sets off in search of bread and distraction and instead runs into a long-ago friend who reminds him of the city he thought he had lost, and the man he once was. As both men are drawn into the orbit of cello music, a fourth characteraa young woman, a sniperaholds the fate of the cellist in her hands. As she protects him with her life, her own army prepares to challenge the kind of person she has become. A novel of great intensity and power, and inspired by a true story, The Cellist of Sarajevo poignantly explores how war can change oneas definition of humanity, the effect of music on our emotional endurance, and how a romance with the rituals of daily life can itself be a form of resistance.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8563 A454C44 2008ISBN: 9781594489860Publication Date: 2008
What We All Long For by
“They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.” What We All Long Forfollows the overlapping stories of a close circle of second-generation twenty-somethings living in downtown Toronto. There’s Tuyen, a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who’ve never recovered from losing one of their children in the crush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. Tuyen defines herself in opposition to just about everything her family believes in and strives for. She’s in love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier, who’s still reeling from the loss of her mother to suicide eighteen years earlier and who must now deal with her brother Jamal’s latest acts of delinquency. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknownst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of university. He is in constant conflict with his narrow-minded and verbally abusive father and tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hip clothing shop on Queen Street West and dates only white men. Like each of her friends, Jackie feels alienated from her parents, former hipsters from Nova Scotia who never made it out of subsidized housing after their lives became entangled with desire and disappointment. The four characters try to make a life for themselves in the city, supporting one another through their family struggles. There’s a fifth main character, Quy, the child who Tuyen’s parents lost in Vietnam. In his first-person narrative, Quy describes how he survived in various refugee camps, then in the Thai underworld. After years of being hardened, he has finally made his way to Toronto and will soon be reunited with his family – whether to love them or hurt them, it’s not clear. His story builds to a breathless crescendo in an ending that will both shock and satisfy readers. What We All Long Foris a gripping and, at times, heart-rending story about identity, longing and loss in a cosmopolitan city. No other writer has presented such a powerful and richly textured portrait of present-day Toronto. Rinaldo Walcottwrites inThe Globe and Mail: “… every great city has its literary moments, and contemporary Toronto has been longing for one. We can now say with certainty that we no longer have to long for a novel that speaks this city’s uniqueness: Dionne Brand has given us exactly that.” Donna Bailey Nurse writes in theNational Post: “What We All Long Foris a watershed novel. From now on, Canadian writers will be pressed to portray contemporary Toronto in all its multiracial colour and polyphonic sound.” ButWhat We All Long Foris not only about a particular city. It’s about the universal experience of being human. As Walcott puts it, “Brand makes us see ourselves differently and anew. She translates our desires and experiences into a language, an art that allows us to voice that which we live, but could not utter or bring to voice until she did so for us.” From the Trade Paperback edition.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8553 R275W4 2005ISBN: 0676971679Publication Date: 2005
Fugitive Pieces by
The novel tells the interlocking story of two men from different generations whose lives have been transformed by war.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8576 I169F84 1996ISBN: 0771058837Publication Date: 1996
Fall on Your Knees by
This is a story of inescapable family bonds, of terrible secrets, of miracles, racial strife, attempted murder, birth and death and forbidden love.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8575 A153F3 1996ISBN: 9780394281780Publication Date: 1996
The Book of Negroes by
Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle--a string of slaves-- Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes." This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8565 I3535B66 2007ISBN: 9781554681563Publication Date: 2007
Ru by
"Written with piercing clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, Ru carries us on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new beginning in Quebec. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy."--Page 2 of cover.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8639 H89R813 2012ISBN: 9780307359711Publication Date: 2012
Anil's Ghost by
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition--and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed 'Sailor.' What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--all propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization,Anil's Ghostis a literary spellbinder--the most powerful novel we have yet had from Michael Ondaatje.
Call Number: Main Stacks (UW) PS 8579 N4A5 2000ISBN: 9780375410536Publication Date: 2000
