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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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2023., Adult, Knopf Canada Call No: Fic Ric Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A beautifully transporting novel capturing the romantic sweep of the twentieth century--from Toronto in the '20s and '30s through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Rome and Florence. Born in 1916, Henry, thin-as-sticks and nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler who shamelessly copies illustrations from his Boys Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, no-nonsense, Shakespeare-quoting, cardsharp grandmother, Henry receives as a gift a pristine set of Faber-Castell colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). He immediately commits each colour to memory--cadmium yellow; light ultramarine; burst ochre; deep scarlet red--and a passion for colour, art, and stories and techniques of the great artists is lit. It will sustain him, and obsess him, on his life's journey through the joys and sorrows of the twentieth century: from a boyhood spent dreaming of adventure, to the hothouse world of artistic academia, a first love cut short by tragedy, the brutality and lingering wounds of World War II, and, in the final chapters of life, the grace of unexpected love. Projected against an efflorescent backdrop of iconic art masterpieces--from the richly hued oils of the European masters to the technicolour splendour of The Wizard of Oz--All the Colour in the World is Henry's story: part miscellany, part memory palace, exquisitely precise with the emotional sweep of a great modern romance.
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c1993., McClelland & Stewart Inc. Call No: Fic URQ Edition: Paperback ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Canada reads Volume: 2013.Summary Note: "A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family's complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel."--Publisher.
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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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c2011., Adult, Penguin Group Call No: Fic Des Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Laure Beausejour has grown up in a dormitory in Paris surrounded by prostitutes, the insane, and other forgotten women. She dreams with her best friend, Madeleine, of using her needlework skills to become a seamstress and one day marry a nobleman. But in 1669, Laure is sent across the Atlantic to New France with Madeleine as filles du roi. The girls know little of the place they are being sent to, except for stories of ferocious winters and Indians who eat the hearts of French priests. To be banished to Canada is a punishment worse than death. Bride of New France explores the challenges Laure faces coming into womanhood in a brutal time and place. From the moment she arrives in Ville-Marie (Montreal) she is expected to marry and produce children with a brutish French soldier who himself can barely survive the harsh conditions of his forest cabin. But through her clandestine relationship with Deskaheh, an allied Iroquois, Laure finds a sense of the possibilities in this New World."--Publisher.
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c2010., Adult, McArthur Call No: Fic Alm Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Alford saga Volume: bk. 1Summary Note: "Imagine you're in a swaying hammock on a British man-o'war around 1800, riding out a harsh spring storm in a deserted estuary of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Behind those high red cliffs lie a hundred miles of uncharted wilderness, populated only by indigenous peoples. If you jump ship and are caught, you will be branded a deserter -- subject to death by one thousand lashes. What can you bring to help you survive? Within minutes, the ice-strewn waters will freeze your body and claim your soul. Even if this were your one chance for a life in the New World, would you jump? Thomas Manning did, and his leap into uncertainty begins the epic tale of a pioneer family, one of the many who built our great nation. Through his and his descendants' eyes, we watch one small community's impact on the great events which swirl about them and bring conflicts they must face in their struggles to create homes and families. Absorbing, touching and full of adventure, THE DESERTER is Book One of the Alford saga, a series chronicling two hundred years of Canadian history, as seen through the eyes of a settler's family."--Back cover.
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By Haldane, Sen2013., Adult, Stone Flower Press Call No: MYS Fic Hal Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In Victoria, 1869, a mutilated body is discovered in the forest: Dr McCrory, an American alienist whose methods include phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical magnetation. Chad Hobbes, newly arrived from England, is the policeman who must solve the crime. Could the murderer be a Tsimshian medicine man, Wiladzap, who is immediately arrested? But everyone who has known McCrory respectable or not has something to hide.
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2021., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: QWF Fic Thu Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In the midst of war, an ordinary miracle: an abandoned baby tenderly cared for by a young boy living on the streets of Saigon. The boy is Louis, the child of a long-gone American soldier. Louis calls the baby em Hong, em meaning "little sister," or "beloved." Even though her cradle is nothing more than a cardboard box, em Hong's life holds every possibility. Through the linked destinies of a family of characters, the novel takes its inspiration from historical events, including Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975, and the remarkable growth of the nail salon industry, dominated by Vietnamese expatriates all over the world. From the rubber plantations of Indochina to the massacre at My Lai, Kim Thúy sifts through the layers of pain and trauma in stories we thought we knew, revealing transcendent moments of grace, and the invincibility of the human spirit.
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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., Adult, Viking Canada Call No: Fic Zha Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In the epic storytelling tradition of Amy Tan and Jiang Rong comes a rich saga chronicling the lives of five generations of a Chinese family from Guandong Province transformed by the promise of a better life in Gold Mountain, the Chinese name for Canada's majestic West Coast. In 1879, 16-year-old Fong Tak-Fat boards a ship to Canada determined to make a life for himself and support his family back home."--Publisher.
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2014., General, Red Deer Press Call No: QWF Fic Alm Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Alford saga Volume: 6Summary Note: Eric Alford's safe and romantic life on the peaceful Gaspe Coast is shattered by his decision to follow his elder brother John (the Pilgrim and The Chaplain) into the 1914-18 cataclysm of death and destruction known as the "Great War for Civilisation". By his thundering Howitzer, Gunner Alford assaults the Hun through every major Canadian battle of WWI: Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Hill 70, The Somme, and "The Hundred Days" that ended the conflict. A developing romance with a lovely Londoner is cut short by a German shell. Evacuated to a Rouen field hospital, he is surrounded by hellish wounds: blindness, amputations, and gas-inflicted horrors. Finally, back in Blighty among other shell-shock victims, he recovers and returns to his Gaspe home, bereft of his London love and changed forever.
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Ã2018., Harper Call No: Fic Goo Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility--much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don't include marriage to the poor French boy the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Phoenix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents send the baby Elodie to an orphanage where she receives horrible treatment. Seventeen years later, Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel spurs a wrenching choice. As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth that has been denied them both.
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2017., Adult, Arachnide, House of Anansi Press Inc. Call No: QWF Fic Maz Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Unwilling to endure a culture of silence and submission, and disowned by her family, Nadia leaves her native Tunisia in 1984 amidst deadly violence, chaos, and rioting brought on by rising food costs, eventually emigrating to Canada to begin her life. More than twenty-five years later, Nadia's daughter Lila reluctantly travels to Tunisia to learn about her mother's birth country. While she's there, she connects with Nadia's childhood friends, Neila and Mounir. She uncovers agonizing truths about her mother's life as a teenager and imagines what it might have been like to grow up in fear of political instability and social unrest. As she is making these discoveries, protests over poor economic conditions and lack of political freedom are increasing, and soon, Lila finds herself in the midst of another revolution--one that will inflame the country and change the Arab world, and her, forever. Weaving together the voices of two women at two pivotal moments in history, the Tunisian Bread Riots in 1984 and the Jasmine Revolution in 2010, Hope Has Two Daughters is a bracing, vivid story that perfectly captures life inside revolution."--From publisher.
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[2018]., Adult, TouchWood Editions Call No: MYS Fic Whi Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Lane Winslow mystery.Summary Note: Summer descends over the picturesque King's Cove (near Nelson, BC) as Inspector Darling and Lane Winslow's mutual affection blossoms. But their respite from solving crime is cut short when a British government official arrives in Nelson to compel Darling to return to England for questioning about the death of a rear gunner under his command in 1943.
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By Gillmor, Donc2009., Viking Canada Call No: Fic Gil Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Kanata was inspired by the life of David Thompson, a Welshman who came to the New World at the age of fifteen, and went on to become its greatest cartographer. He walked or paddled 80,000 miles and mapped 1.9 million square miles, cataloguing flora and fauna as well as the language and customs of the Natives. But though he has been described as the greatest land geographer who ever lived, he died impoverished and unknown. Following the lives of Thompson's illegitimate son and his descendants, Kanata takes readers on a fictionalized, multi-generational journey through millennia and across a continent to examine the stories, myths, and legends of those who formed the country and who were formed by it. Kanata is the story of the invention of a nation."--Publisher.
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2012., Adult, Coach House Books Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: Twenty-five years after the war of 'Three Day Road', Joseph Boyden revisits Xavier Bird, who looks to his sons to help defeat an old foe on the trap lines. Kikwaakew first appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Walrus magazine.
![Kikwaakew [eBook]](/Library/images/~imageCT77286.JPG "Kikwaakew [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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c2010., Adult, Thomas Allen Call No: Fic MacS Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A gifted, inspiring and wildly popular Prime Minister, Laurier is equally devoted to his quiet, faithful wife Zoe and his ambitious charismatic lover Emilie Lavergne. The story is told through the eyes of these remarkable women - friends who are also rivals for Laurier's heart. Both must contend with the dark contradictions in his nature as he professes to be committed to each of them while uniting a divided nation."--Inside front cover.
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Ã2017., Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: MYS Fic Jen Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Detective Murdoch mystery Volume: 8Summary Note: "It is November 1917. Initially, in the loyal Dominion of Canada, people are mostly eager to support the Motherland and fight for the Empire, but the carnage is horrendous and with enforced conscription, the enthusiasm for war is dimming. William Murdoch is a widower, a senior detective who, thanks to the new temperance laws, spends his time tracking down bootleggers and tipplers. As we enter the story, Jack, Murdoch's estranged son, now twenty-one, has returned from France after being wounded and gassed at the Battle of Passchendaele. The night after Jack arrives home, a young man is found stabbed to death in the impoverished area of Toronto known as the Ward. Soon after, Murdoch has to deal with a tragic suicide, also a young man. Two more murders follow in quick succession. The only common denominator is that all of the men were exempted from conscription. Increasingly worried that Jack knows more than he is letting on, Murdoch must solve these crimes before more innocents lose their lives--"--From publisher.
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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.
