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-- Africaville.2019., Adult, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd Call No: BLK Fic Col Edition: First Canadian edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: This debut novel is the richly woven story of a town settled by former slaves on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia, known as Africville, and of the Sebolt family, who moves there in the 1930s. Teenager Kath Ella Sebolt wants desperately to escape the town that she equates with deprivation and lack of opportunity. Months after her boyfriend is killed during a clash between young people in the village and Halifax constables, she moves with her infant son to Montreal. After attending college as a single mother, and ultimately marrying a white man, she discovers that as much as she tries, severing ties to her former village is not easy. Kath Ella's son Etienne puts even more distance between himself and the village, first moving across the border to Vermont, and then farther south to Alabama, where he passes for white. Etienne's son Warner finds his standing in his all-white community compromised by the sudden revelation that he has black grandparents. As the story comes full circle, Warner travels to Africville to get to know his black relatives. They, however, are suspicious of his motivations. The family saga unfolds against the backdrop of Africville, based on a real place that has become a symbol not only of Black Canadian identity, but also of how the human spirit remains resilient in the face of adversity, tragedy and change.
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2009., National Geographic Entertainment ; Virgil Films Call No: DVD Fic Amreeka Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryConnect to reviews of this title online. Summary Note: Muna Farah, a Palestinian single mom, struggles to maintain her optimistic spirit in the daily grind of intimidating West Bank checkpoints, the constant nagging of a controlling mother, and the haunting shadows of a failed marriage. Everything changes one day when she receives a letter informing her that her family has been granted a U.S. green card, and she moves with her teenage son to small town Illinois.
![Amreeka [DVD] (2009) Directed by Cherien Dabis](/Library/images/~imageCT73716.JPG "Amreeka [DVD] (2009) Directed by Cherien Dabis")
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2016., Adult, Scribner Call No: Fic Pro Edition: 1st Scribner hardcover ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Bark Skins open in New France in the late 18th century as Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman makes his way from Northern France to the homeland to seek a living. Bound to a 'seigneur' for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship and violence, always in awe of the forest he is charged with clearing. In the course of this epic novel, Proulx tells the stories of Rene's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as the descendants of his friends and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing stunningly brutal conditions--war, pestilence, Indian attacks, the revenge of rivals. Proulx's inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid--in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope--that we follow them with fierce attention. This is Proulx's most ambitious novel ever, and her master work"--From publisher.
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By Bala, Sharon2018., Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: Fic Bal Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "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."--From publisher.
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2019., Adult, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd Call No: QWF IND MYS Fic McB Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Nanabush. A name that has a certain weight on the tongue--a taste. Like lit sage in a windowless room or aluminum foil on a metal filling.Since coming home to Spirit Bear Point First Nation, Hazel Ellis has been dreaming of an old crow. He tells her he's here to help her, save her. From what, exactly? Sure, her dad's been dead for almost two years and she hasn't quite reconciled that grief, but is that worth the time of an Algonquin demigod? Soon Hazel learns that there's more at play than just her own sadness and doubt. The quarry that's been lying unsullied for over a century on her father's property is stirring the old magic that crosses the boundaries between this world and the next. With the aid of Nanabush, Hazel must unravel a web of deceit that, if left untouched, could destroy her family and her home on both sides of the Medicine Wheel.
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2022., Arsenal Pulp Press Click to access digital title. Sample Summary Note: When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth. Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.
![Dandelion [eBook]](/Library/images/~imageCT102967.JPG "Dandelion [eBook]")
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c1944., J.B. Lippincott company Call No: Fic Gra Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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2008., Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press Call No: Fic Lee Edition: 1st U.S. ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryClick here to watch Click here to view
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2020., Adult, Simon & Schuster Call No: Fic Gra Edition: Simon & Schuster Canada edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Canada, 2018: At ninety-seven years old, Winnifred Ellis knows she doesn't have much time left. Soon she'll be gone, just like her husband, her daughter, and the many loved ones she's lost over the years, and the story of her shameful past will die with her. When her great grandson Jamie, the spitting image of her husband, asks about his family tree, Winnifred can't lie any longer, even if it means breaking a promise she made so long ago. . . England, 1936: Fifteen-year-old Winny has never known a real home. After running away from an abusive stepfather, she falls in with Mary and Jack and their ragtag group of friends roaming the streets of Liverpool, but when they are caught stealing food, Winny and Mary are placed in Dr. Barnardo's Barkingside Home for Girls, a local home for orphans and forgotten children found in the city's slums. There, Winny learns she will join other boys and girls in a faraway place called Canada, where families eagerly await them. But when they arrive, their dream of a better life is quickly shattered. Winny is separated from Mary and Jack and sent to live with a family who doesn't want another daughter, but an indentured servant to work on their farm. Faced with this harsh new reality, Winny clings to the hope that she will someday find her friends again."--
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c2011., Adolescent, Harper Call No: Fic Arm Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Darkness rising Volume: bk. 1.Summary Note: Sixteen-year-old Maya suspects there may be a link between her paw-print birthmark, her connection with wild animals, and the strange events occurring in her tiny Vancouver Island community, where a medical research facility harbors big secrets.
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2021., Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: Fic Fun Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stayed in Hong Kong to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Vancouver before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father throughout the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
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c2015., Adult, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Call No: MYS Fic Mar Edition: 1st Canadian ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The body in the snow is that of Ben Wylie, the heir to America's second-wealthiest business dynasty, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in post-crash New York, Jamie Cabot, the son of the Wylie family's housekeepers, must figure out how and why Ben died. He knows the answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who over three generations built up their massive holdings into several billion dollars' worth of real estate, oil, and information systems despite a terrible family secret they must keep from the world. The threads of the Wylie men's destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, chilling revelation.
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c2012., General, Anansi Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: Juliet Friesen is 10-years-old when her family moves to Nicaragua. It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of tumult, Juliet's family lives outside the boundaries of ordinary life. They've escaped, and the usual rules don't apply. When Juliet's younger brother becomes sick with cancer, their adventure ends abruptly. The Friesens return to Canada only to find that their lives beyond Nicaragua have become the war zone.
![The Juliet stories [eBook]](/Library/images/~imageCT74733.JPG "The Juliet stories [eBook]")
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2023., Adult, Arachnide Call No: NEW IND Fic Jea Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean's great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community. Kukum recounts the story of Almanda Siméon, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle, who falls in love with a young Innu man despite their cultural differences and goes on to share her life with the Pekuakami Innu community. They accept her as one of their own: Almanda learns their language, how to live a nomadic existence, and begins to break down the barriers imposed on Indigenous women. Unfolding over the course of a century, the novel details the end of traditional ways of life for the Innu, as Almanda and her family face the loss of their land and confinement to reserves, and the enduring violence of residential schools. Kukum intimately expresses the importance of Innu ancestral values and the need for freedom nomadic peoples feel to this day.
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2021., Adult, Simon & Schuster Canada Call No: Fic Gra Edition: Simon & Schuster Canada edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Inspired by a little-known chapter of World War II history, a young Protestant girl and her Jewish neighbour are caught up in the terrible wave of hate sweeping the globe on the eve of war.
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2014., Penguin Group Canada Call No: QWF Fic Rot Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Luc Lévesque is a celebrated Quebec novelist and the anointed Voice of a Generation. In his hometown of Montreal, he is revered as much for his novels about the working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri as for his separatist views. But this is 2001. The dreams of a new nation are dying, and Luc himself is increasingly dissatisfied with his life.Hannah is Lucœs wife. She is also the daughter of a man who served as a special prosecutor during the October Crisis. For years, Hannah has worked faithfully as Lucœs English translator. She has also spent her adult life distancing herself from her English- speaking family. But at what cost?Hugo is their troubled fourteen-year-old son. Living in the shadow of a larger-than-life father, Hugo is struggling with his own identity. In confusion and anger, he commits a reckless act that puts everyone around him on a collision course with the past.Weaving together three unique voices, My October is a masterful tale of a modern family torn apart by the power of language and the weight of history. Spare and insightful, Claire Holden Rothmanœs new novel explores the fascinating and sometimes shocking consequences of words left unsaid.
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By Ali, Anar2019., Adult, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Canada Call No: Fic Ali Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "As the heir to a successful business empire in Uganda, Mansoor Visram had everything a man could want: money, power, influence, a beautiful wife, and a baby son. But when Idi Amin's regime begins its crackdown on its South Asian population, Mansoor and his family are forced to flee, leaving behind everything. As refugees, they arrive in Canada, settling in Calgary, but the strain of what the family has been through begins to show. Years later, Mansoor's son, Ashif, is a rising star in a multinational firm. He has spent years distancing himself from his overbearing father but finds himself continuously drawn back to the family he left behind. Now, his father claims he has a plan for a dry cleaning franchise that will raise the Visrams back into their old position of prominence. But after so many failed attempts to succeed, one more pipe dream may be too many for the family to bear. Night of Power examines the psychological and emotional burdens placed on a family of refugees. What they leave behind and what they hope to gain in the future are all carefully weighed in Anar Ali's beautifully crafted prose that reflects the dream-like quality of past triumphs and the vivid realism of today."--.
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c2011., General, House of Anansi Press Call No: Fic Beh Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "THE O'BRIENS follows the family from THE LAW OF DREAMS (Governor General's Literary Award-winner) two generations later: Joe O'Brien is coming of age in a new century in remote Pontiac County, Quebec, with his two brothers and two sisters by his side. After escaping the poverty of Pontiac, Joe travels the continent, building an empire and a bright young family with his wife, Iseult, but he is never quite able to leave his past behind. Told from the perspective of Joe, Iseult, and their children and spanning the construction of the Canadian railroad as well as both world wars, this is an epic of great heart, imagination and narrative force."--Publisher.
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-- Trickster.2021., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Canada Call No: IND Fic Rob Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Trickster trilogy Volume: [3]Summary Note: Jared, now 18, wakes up in a hospital bed, feeling like hell. Some of the people he loves-- the ones who are deaf to magic-- assume he fell off the wagon after a tough year of sobriety and went on a bender to end all benders. They think that's why movers found him naked, dangerously dehydrated and confused in the basement of his mom's old house in Kitimat. The truth for Jared, who has spent two years running from it, is so much worse. He finally knows for sure that he will never be normal because he is the son of Wee'git, a Trickster, and a Trickster himself. He is actually in such bad shape because he was forced into mortal combat with his father's sister, Aunt Georgina, a maniacal ogress hungry for his power. In the struggle, he transported her and her posse of shape-shifting coy wolves to another dimension where the coy wolves all died. Now Georgina doesn't only want to eat him, she wants revenge on his whole family. There's more bad news: the only person in his life who is happy that he's a Trickster is his ex, Sarah. Everyone else he loves is either pissed with him or at risk of becoming an unwitting victim of the darker forces he's unleashed in their world. His mother Maggie, a hard-partying, gun-toting, tough-as-nails witch, resents like hell that Jared has taken after his father, but she is also determined that no one is going to eat her boy. For Maggie it's simple: Kill or be killed, bucko. Soon Jared is at the centre of an all-out war. A horrible place to be for the sweetest Trickster there's ever been, one whose first instinct is not mischief and mind games but to make the world around him a kinder, safer, place.
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2014., University of Manitoba Press Call No: Fic Nap Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Sanaaq is an intimate story of an Inuit family negotiating the changes brought into their community by the coming of the qallunaat, the white people, in the mid-nineteenth century. Composed in 48 episodes, it recounts the daily life of Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, her daughter Qumaq, and their small semi-nomadic community in northern Quebec. Here they live their lives hunting seal, repairing their kayak, and gathering mussels under blue sea ice before the tide comes in. These are ordinary extraordinary lives: marriages are made and unmade, children are born and named, violence appears in the form of a fearful husband or a hungry polar bear. Here the spirit world is alive and relations with non-humans are never taken lightly. And under it all, the growing intrusion of the qallunaat and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries threatens to forever change the way of life of Sanaaq and her young family.
