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Days by Moonlight
by Andreþ Alexis
Almost a year to the date of his parents' death, botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents' friend Professor Morgan Bruno. Professor Bruno wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious and perhaps dead poet John Skennen. But Days By Moonlight is also a journey through an underworld that looks like southern Ontario, a journey taken during the hour of the wolf, that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can't tell the difference between dog and wolf, a time when the world and the imagination won't stay in their own lanes. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language during the day and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, witches, and plants with unusual properties.
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The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding
by Jennifer Robson
London, 1947: Besieged by the harshest winter in living memory, burdened by onerous shortages and rationing, the people of postwar Britain are enduring lives of quiet desperation in spite of their nation's recent victory. Among them are Ann Hughes and Miriam Dassin, embroiderers in the famed Mayfair fashion house of Norman Hartnell. Together they forge an unlikely friendship, but their bond, along with their nascent hopes for a brighter future, are tested when they are chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime honor: taking part in the creation of Princess Elizabeth's wedding gown.
Toronto, 2011: More than half a century later, Heather Mackenzie seeks to unravel the mystery of a set of embroidered flowers, a legacy from her late grandmother. How did her beloved Nan, a woman who never spoke of her old life in Britain, come to possess the priceless embroideries, so similar to the exquisite motifs that embellished the stunning gown worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her wedding more than sixty years before? And what was her Nan's connection to the celebrated textile artist Miriam Dassin? The Gown takes us inside the workrooms where one of the most famous wedding gowns in history was created, balancing behind-the-scenes details with a sweeping portrait of a society left reeling by the calamitous costs of victory. Its heroines, whose points of view alternate and intersect throughout its pages, are connected by threads of loss and love, suffering and survival, regret and redemption.
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The Quintland Sisters
by Shelley Wood
Reluctant midwife Emma Trimpany is just 17 when she assists at the harrowing birth of the Dionne quintuplets: five tiny miracles born to French farmers in hardscrabble Northern Ontario in 1934. Emma cares for them through their perilous first days and when the government decides to remove the babies from their francophone parents, making them wards of the British king, Emma signs on as their nurse. Over 6,000 daily visitors come to ogle the identical 'Quints' playing in their custom-built playground; atthe height of the Great Depression, the tourism and advertising dollars pour in. While the rest of the world delights in their sameness, Emma sees each girl as unique: Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Marie, and Émilie. With her quirky eye for detail, Emma records every strange twist of events in her private journals. As the fight over custody and revenues turns increasingly explosive, Emma is torn between the fishbowl sanctuary of Quintland and the wider world, now teetering on the brink of war. Steeped in research, The Quintland Sisters is a novel of love, heartache, resilience, and enduring sisterhood--a fictional, coming-of-age story bound up in one of the strangest true tales of the past century.
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A Brightness Long Ago
by Guy Gavriel Kay
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.
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The Migration
by Helen Marshall
Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder called JI2 has begun to afflict the young. Seventeen-year-old Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents' marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie's mother, Charlotte, takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene. An epidemiologist obsessed with relics of the Black Death, Irene works with a Centre that specializes in treating people with JI2. She is a friend to Sophie, and offers a window into a strange and ancient history of human plague and recovery. Sophie just wants to understand what's happening now; she wants her sweet, goofy sister to be back to normal. But as JI2 mortality rates climb, and reports emerge of bodily tremors in the dead, it becomes clear there is nothing normal about this condition. Desperate to protect Kira, cut off from the world of her youth, Sophie faces an unimaginable choice: let go of the sister she knows, or embrace something terrifying and new.
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The Handmaid's Tale [graphic novel]
by Renee Nault
Provocative, startling, prophetic, and more relevant than ever, The Handmaid's Tale has become a global phenomenon. Now, in this stunning graphic novel edition of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, the terrifying reality of Gilead is brought to vivid life like never before. 'Everything Handmaids wear is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.' Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose: once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.
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Greg Curnoe
by Judith Rodger
Passionately and unapologetically Canadian, artist and activist Greg Curnoe (1936-1992) transformed his hometown of London, Ontario, into an important city for artistic production. Born in 1936, he strongly rejected the idea of moving to "the centre" (Toronto or New York) and spearheaded London Regionalism, a movement that focused on everyday life and turned away from the metropolitan mores of the 1960s and 1970s art scene. Greg Curnoe: Life & Work chronicles the artist's significant and provocative career and documents how his striking and brightly coloured painting, sculpture, video, and photography made a powerful imprint on this country's cultural landscape.
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Shuvinai Ashoona
by Nancy Campbell
Born in Kinngait (Cape Dorset) in 1961, Shuvinai is part of a famed dynasty of artists that includes her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona and her Sobey Art Award-winning cousin, the late Annie Pootoogook. In the mid-1990s Shuvinai began producing detailed, primarily monochromatic drawings depicting the natural landscapes and traditions of the North. By the late 1990s, however, her attentions shifted to fantastical creatures, dreamlike landscapes, and aerial-perspective representations of a global community, expressed in vivid colour. Shuvinai Ashoona: Life & Work explores the world of an artist whose rich graphic imagery conveys an intricate and textured personal vision. Using pencil, pen and ink, and markers to render dense, highly imaginative drawings, Shuvinai creates art that reflects the intersection of values between the traditional and the contemporary in the North.
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Molly Lamb Bobak
by Michelle Gewurtz
The daughter of celebrated photographer Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Vancouver-born artist Molly Lamb Bobak (1920-2014) joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps in 1942 and was sent overseas to London, becoming the first Canadian woman war artist. She brashly captured women's military life and roles during the Second World War in her paintings, illustrated diaries, and drawings, depicting female military training as well as dynamic scenes of marches and parades. Upon her return to Canada, Bobak married fellow war artist Bruno Bobak, and the couple settled in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where they lived and worked for over half a century. One of the first Canadian female painters to earn her living as an artist, Bobak was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1973 and presented with the Order of Canada in 1995. Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work traces the career of this pioneering Canadian painter and the diverse range of her artistic output, from her still lifes and interiors to her crowd scenes and self-portraits. It explores Bobak's legacy as a painter and educator and what it meant to be a female artist in mid-twentieth-century Canada.
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Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald
by Michael Parke-Taylor
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) imbued his art with the beauty and essence of his surroundings. Although he became the Group of Seven's tenth member in 1932, his style was vastly different from his counterparts in Ontario. His realist images of domesticity revealed his focus on the extraordinary aspects of everyday life rather than the Canadian wilderness.
Quiet in personality and passionate about art, as both principal and teacher at the Winnipeg School of Art from the 1920s to the 1940s FitzGerald inspired a generation of students. During the last years of his life, his West Coast sojourns in British Columbia saw his painting style move toward abstraction.
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