September 13, 2024
New Fiction
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig -When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Real Ones by Katherena Vermette – June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs – real ones. lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Metis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg. But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world, Winnipeg awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work. The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well-curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson – Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed. Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted to a hotel hosting Murder Mystery Weekends. As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.
New Non-Fiction
The Knowing by Tanya Talaga – For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums – a coordinated system designed to destroy who First Nations, Metis and Inuit are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is an unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can – through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great-grandmother Annie Carpenter and following subsequent generations as they lived through decades of government and Church sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.