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c2014., Adult, Viking/Penguin Books Canada Inc. Call No: Fic Hus Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Screenwriter Milo Noirlac is dying. He lies in the dark of his hospital room, voices from Milo's past and present - real and imagined - swirl about his head, each taking on the rhythm of his favourite Brazilian fight-dance, the capoiera. Seated next to him, Milo's partner, bumptious director Paul Schwartz, coaxes Milo through his life story, from the abuse he suffered as a foster child to his lost heritage - his great-grandfather's ostentatious wealth. As Milo narrates, his story becomes the couple's final screenplay, the movie that will be their masterpiece.
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2019., Adult, Viking Call No: Fic Kay Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: From the internationally bestselling author of Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan comes a masterful new novel set in a vivid world evoking early Renaissance Italy and offering an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives come together through destiny, love, and ambition. In a chamber overlooking the nighttime waterways of a maritime city, a man recalls his youth and the people who shaped his life. Danio Cerra's intelligence won him entry to a renowned school even though he was only the son of a tailor. He took service at the court of a count--and soon learned why that man was known as the Beast. Danio's fate changed the moment he recognized Adria Ripoli as she entered the Beast's chambers one autumn night, intending to kill. Born to power, Adria had chosen, instead of a life of comfort, one of danger--and freedom--which is how she encounters Danio in a perilous time and place. Unforgettable figures share the unfolding story. Among them: a healer determined to defy her expected lot; a charming, frivolous son of immense wealth; a powerful religious leader more decadent than devout; and, affecting all these lives and many more, two larger-than-life mercenary commanders, lifelong adversaries, whose rivalry puts a world in the balance. A Brightness Long Ago offers both compelling drama and deeply moving reflections on the nature of memory, the choices we make in life, and the role played by the turning of Fortune's wheel.
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2009, c2008., Plume Call No: Fic Ben Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.
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1998., Oxford University Press Call No: Fic Mac c.2 Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Library of Latin America
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2014., General, Doubleday Canada Call No: Fic Sta Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Catherine the Great muses on her life, her relentless battle between love and power, the country she brought into the glorious new century, and the bodies left in her wake. By the end of her life, she had accomplished more than virtually any other woman in history. She built and grew the Romanov empire, amassed a vast fortune of art and land, and controlled an unruly and conniving court. Now, in a voice both indelible and intimate, she reflects on the decisions that gained her the world and brought her enemies to their knees. And before her last breath, shadowed by the bloody French Revolution, she sets up the end game for her last political maneuver, ensuring her successor and the greater glory of Russia.
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2009., Adult, House of Anansi Edition: eBook ed. Connect to this eBook title Summary Note: Helen O'Mara's life is divided between her everyday existence as mother and grandmother and her internal memories and reflections on her life with her late husband Cal who died long ago aboard the oil rig Ocean Ranger. Then Helen's wayward son John returns home asking his mother to help him decide how to deal with his girlfriend's pregnancy.
![February [eBook]](/Library/images/~imageCT75001.JPG "February [eBook]")
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By Seguin, Marc2021., Exile Editions Call No: NEW QWF Fic Ség Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: This is a profound and moving novel that ponders family and home through the reflections of an intriguing protagonist whose very real troubles are offset by bright flashes of hope. Truth or fiction? In A Fine Line Marc Séguin offers the reader an irresistible torn-from-life story about friendship, art, sex, and love as he revisits the boy, the adolescent, and the young man he once was - all three tormented by incessant worry, they now haunt the renowned painter, film director, and author he has become. His striking reflections - shaped by deaths, confessions put to the test, a friendship destroyed, and memories of the beautiful Arielle - masterfully punctuate this story about a man who regrets not having loved enough... or perhaps having loved too late.
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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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2004., Adult, HarperCollinsPublishersLtd. Call No: Fic Rob Edition: 1st Canadian ed. . Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Gilead Volume: 1Summary Note: It's 1956 in Gilead, Iowa, towards the end of the Reverend John Ames's life. The son and grandson of preachers, he is absorbed in recording his family's story, a legacy for theyoung child he will never see grow up. Haunted by his grandfather's presence, John tells of the rift between his grandfather and his father: the elder, an angry visionary who fought for the abolitionist cause, and his son, an ardent pacifist. He is troubled, too, by his prodigal namesake, jack (John Ames) Boughton, his best friend's lost son who returns to Gilead searching for a salvation the town might not hold. Told in John Ames's joyous, rambling voice that finds beauty, humor and truth in the smallest of life's details, Gilead is a wonderful, heartfelt song of celebration and acceptance of the best and the worst the world has to offer. At its heart is a tale of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, pitch-perfect in style and story.
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c2014., General, House of Anansi Press Inc. Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: The story of Aganetha Smart, a former Olympic athlete who was famous in the 1920s, but now, at age 104, lives in a nursing home, alone and forgotten by history. For Aganetha, a competitive and ambitious woman, her life remains present and unfinished in her mind. When her quiet life is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of two young strangers, Aganetha begins to reflect on her childhood in rural Ontario and her struggles to make an independent life for herself in the city.
![Girl runner [eBook] : a novel](/Library/images/~imageCT76611.JPG "Girl runner [eBook] : a novel")
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2008., Adult, Atria Books Call No: Fic Mor Edition: 1st Atria Books Hardcover ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The House at Riverton is a gorgeous debut novel set in England between the wars. It is the story of an aristocratic family, a house, a mysterious death and a way of life that vanished forever, told in flashback by a woman who witnessed it all and kept a secret for decades. Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they -- and Grace -- know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight years old and living out her last days in a nursing home, she is visited by a young director who is making a film about the events of that summer. She takes Grace back to Riverton House and reawakens her memories. Told in flashback, this is the story of Grace's youth during the last days of Edwardian aristocratic privilege shattered by war, of the vibrant twenties and the changes she witnessed as an entire way of life vanished forever. The novel is full of secrets -- some revealed, others hidden forever, reminiscent of the romantic suspense of Daphne du Maurier. It is also a meditation on memory, the devastation of war and a beautifully rendered window into a fascinating time in history."--Publisher description.
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c2010., Random House Call No: Fic Ber Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: To each of the men and women in "The last time I saw you", this reunion means something different. A last opportunity to say something long left unsaid, an escape from the bleaker realities of everyday life, a means to save a marriage on the rocks, or an opportunity to bond with a slightly estranged daughter, if only over what her mother should wear.
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c2012., General, Little, Brown and Co. Call No: Fic Rog Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Forced into an overcrowded lifeboat after a mysterious explosion on their trans-Atlantic ocean liner, newly widowed Grace Winter battles the elements and her fellow survivors and remembers her husband, Henry, who set his own safety aside to ensure Grace's.
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-- Love & treasurec2014., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Call No: Fic Wal Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure--a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman--a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life."--Publisher's web site.
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2016., Adult, Harper Call No: Fic Cha Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as 'my grandfather.' It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact--and the creative power--of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy's Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination."--From publisher.
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c2011., Adult, Doubleday Canada Call No: Fic Fra Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Joyce Sparks is faced with the impending sale of her house and an uncertain future, she sifts through her past, dusting off unsettling memories of her son, John, and the secrets about him that she has kept hidden from her husband, friends and neighbours - and even from herself. When she discovers a horrible lie about a treasured childhood friend, Joyce's carefully constructed world begins to unravel, revealing the devastating consequences of choices she made long ago..."--Publisher.
