November 15th
New Fiction
Blue-blooded Sophie de Grouchy believes in democracy, education, and equal rights for women, and marries the only man in Paris who agrees. Emboldened to fight the injustices of King Louis XVI, Sophie aims to prove that an educated populace can govern itself--but one of her students, fruit-seller Louise Audu, is hungrier for bread and vengeance than learning. When the Bastille falls and Louise leads a women’s march to Versailles, the monarchy is forced to bend, but not without a fight. The king’s pious sister Princess Elisabeth takes a stand to defend her brother, spirit her family to safety, and restore the old order, even at the risk of her head. But when fanatics use the newspapers to twist the revolution’s ideals into a new tyranny, even the women who toppled the monarchy are threatened by the guillotine. Putting her faith in the pen, brilliant political wife Manon Roland tries to write a way out of France’s blood-soaked Reign of Terror while pike-bearing Pauline Leon and steely Charlotte Corday embrace violence as the only way to save the nation. With justice corrupted by revenge, all the women must make impossible choices to survive--unless unlikely heroine and courtesan’s daughter Emilie de Sainte-Amaranthe can sway the man who controls France’s fate: the fearsome Robespierre. Ribbons of Scarlet written by Kate Quinn, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, Sophie Perinot, Heather Webb and E.Knight, is a timely story of the power of women to start a revolution—and change the world.
One for the blackbird, one for the crow by Olivia Hawker. Wyoming, 1876. For as long as they have lived on the frontier, the Bemis and Webber families have relied on each other. With no other settlers for miles, it is a matter of survival. But when Ernest Bemis finds his wife, Cora, in a compromising situation with their neighbor, he doesn’t think of survival. In one impulsive moment, a man is dead, Ernest is off to prison, and the women left behind are divided by rage and remorse. Losing her husband to Cora’s indiscretion is another hardship for stoic Nettie Mae. But as a brutal Wyoming winter bears down, Cora and Nettie Mae have no choice but to come together as one family—to share the duties of working the land and raising their children. There’s Nettie Mae’s son, Clyde—no longer a boy, but not yet a man—who must navigate the road to adulthood without a father to guide him, and Cora’s daughter, Beulah, who is as wild and untameable as her prairie home. Bound by the uncommon threads in their lives and the challenges that lie ahead, Cora and Nettie Mae begin to forge an unexpected sisterhood. But when a love blossoms between Clyde and Beulah, bonds are once again tested, and these two resilient women must finally decide whether they can learn to trust each other—or else risk losing everything they hold dear.
A large alien object has entered the solar system on a straight course toward Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate and is ignoring all transmissions. Out of time and out of options, NASA turns to former Mission Commander Sally Jansen. Jansen was their leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she lives in quiet anonymity, convinced her days in space are over. She’s wrong. The Last Astronaut by David Wellington is a gripping near future thriller that charts one crew’s desperate struggle for survival in a terrifying unknown.
New Non-Fiction
Norman Bethune- Ontario-born, hero to a billion and a half Chinese-was a surgeon, medical inventor, tumultuous romantic, and advocate for the poor. Adrienne Clarkson makes fascinating sense of this complicated man by showing how every stage in his life prepared him for what followed. Born on the Canadian Shield, he worked with illiterate labourers in rough lumber camps, and later interrupted his medical studies to become a stretcher-bearer in World War I. Having battled tuberculous both as a patient and as a doctor, he created the first mobile blood-transfusion unit in the Spanish Civil War. Bethune died serving the guerilla forces of Mao Zedong, but throughout his life he was driven to ease human suffering, and in doing so he embodied a new Canadian spirit of internationalism.
In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants weaves together Hui’s own family history―from her grandfather’s decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father’s path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest “Western” kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret―with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind “chop suey” cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like “ginger beef” and “Newfoundland chow mein,” and other uniquely Canadian fare like the “Chinese pierogies” of Alberta