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The Garden of Lost Secrets
by Kelly Bowen
1940 - Stasia always found comfort in the idyllic French countryside where she spent her childhood summers, roaming the gardens of an old chateau. But these days are much darker, and with Nazis storming across Europe, she soon finds herself one of the most hunted agents of the Resistance. The only safe haven she can think of is Chateau de Montissaire. But she's about to discover that it just may be the center of her biggest mission yet.
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Far Creek Road
by Lesley Krueger
It’s 1961, and Mary Alice (Tink) Parker is nine years old. She lives with her parents in a Vancouver suburb where many fathers are traumatized veterans of the Second World War and almost all the mothers are housewives. They believe they’ve earned secure and prosperous lives after the sacrifices they made during the war. But under the conformist veneer seethe conflicts and secrets that make the serenity of Grouse Valley precarious.
The parents of Tink’s best friend Norman are schoolteachers with leftist beliefs. When the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens, Norman’s parents face a witch hunt while the boy becomes a target of bullies. Tink does her best to defend Norman. But as she looks for help, Tink stumbles on a web of secrets — including evidence of a torrid affair — that will change their lives forever.
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The Legacy
by Gail Bowen
When Joanne Shreve’s former student, Val Masluk, writes the biography of acclaimed novelist Steven Brooks, Val once again becomes part of Joanne’s life. The biography is already raising troubling questions about Brooks’s past, and the wedding of Brooks’s daughter and Joanne’s son is scheduled for the day before the biography is published. Both Joanne and her former student are haunted by memories of the seminar that led to the deaths of two people and the murder conviction of a third. The publication of the Brooks biography poses a threat not only to the future of the man and woman about to be married but also to the futures of those who love them. Joanne is certain that the threat is rooted in either her past or in that of Steven Brooks. The collateral damage caused by exposing that link will bring pain to both families, but life has taught Joanne that the only thing worse than knowing is not knowing.
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Yara
by Tamara Faith Berger
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.
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Let It Destroy You
by Harriet Alida Lye
It is August 12, 1945. Tomorrow, August Snow will be tried at the International War Crimes Court for patenting a more lethal variation on the atomic bomb. He invented a radiation machine to cure his young daughter’s cancer, despite knowing that the very same technology was capable of great destruction, and inevitably profited from disaster. But are his intentions relevant when the fate of the world is at stake?
August’s former wife, June, will also attend the hearing. Restless in her Hague hotel room the night before, she keeps watch over their daughter and reflects on the events that brought them here. She had nothing to do with making the bomb. But is she innocent? Wouldn’t any wife and mother have done the same thing in her shoes? And now, will it cost her everything?
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Someday I'll Find You
by C.C. Humphreys
When Billy Coke steps onto the streets of London one December evening in 1940, he has no idea he is stepping to his fate. As Hitler's bombers come close to burning the city down, Billy meets the woman who will change the course of his life: Ilse Magnusson, a musician from Norway, but also something more--a spy in training. Escaping the Blitz for three days, she and Billy drive, quarrel, conceal, reveal... and fall finally, fully, in love.
Now they must part, each to fight the war their own way. Billy, a Canadian Spitfire pilot, to duel with the Luftwaffe over North Africa and the Med. Ilse to return to her conquered country, ingratiate herself with the Nazi elite--which includes her beloved father--and send vital intelligence back to Britain.
They know that the odds of both of them surviving are poor. All they can hope is that the other does survive--and that someday they find each other again
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The Bittlemores
by Jann Arden
On mean Harp Bittlemore’s blighted farm, hidden away in the Backhills, nothing has gone right for a very long time. Crops don’t grow, the pigs and chickens stay skinny and the three aged dairy cows, Berle, Crilla and Dally, are so desperate they are plotting an escape. The one thing holding them back is the thought of abandoning young Willa, the single bright point in their life since her older sister, Margaret, ran away.
But Willa Bittlemore, just turning 14, is planning her own rebellion. Something doesn’t add up in the story she’s been told about her missing sister, and she's beginning to question if her horrible parents are even her parents at all. Just as things are really coming to a head, a bright young police officer starts investigating a cold case involving a baby stolen from a little rural hospital 28 years earlier, and Willa and the cows find out exactly how far the Bittlemores will go to protect a festering secret.
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The Class: A Memoir of a Place, a Time, and Us
by Ken Dryden
On Tuesday, September 6, 1960, the day after Labour Day, class 9G at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in a suburb of Toronto assembled for the first time. Its thirty-five students, having written special exams, came to be known as the “Selected Class.”
Their ancestors were almost all from working-class backgrounds. Their parents had lived their formative years through depression and war. They themselves were born into a postwar world of new homes, new schools, new churches. New suburbs. Of new classes like this one. Of boundless possibilities.
Ken Dryden was one of these thirty-five. In his varied, improbable life, he had wondered often how he had gotten from there to here . How any of us do. He decided to try and find his classmates, to see how they are, what they are doing, how life has been for them. They talked many long hours, in a way they had never talked before. Most had married, some divorced, most have kids, many have grandkids
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The Road Years: A Memoir, Continued...
by Rick Mercer
At the end of his memoir Talking to Canadians , Rick Mercer was poised to make the biggest leap yet in his extraordinary career. Having overcome a serious lack of promise as a schoolboy and risen through the showbiz ranks he was about to tackle his biggest opportunity yet.
The Road Years picks up the story at that exciting point, with the greenlighting of what would become Rick Mercer Report . Plans for the show, of course, included political satire and Rick’s patented rants. But Rick and his partner, Gerald Lunz, were also determined to do something that comedy tends to avoid as too they would emphasize the positive. Rick would travel from coast to coast to coast in search of everything that’s best about Canada, especially its people. He found a lot to celebrate, naturally, and was rewarded with a huge audience and a run of 15 seasons.
Join the celebration, and revive a wealth of happy memories, with what is Rick Mercer’s funniest, most fascinating book yet.
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Bred: Sourdough Loaves, Small Breads, and Other Plant-Based Baking
by Ed Tatton
Vegan chef and artisan bread-maker Ed Tatton shares techniques and 100 recipes for making naturally leavened sourdough loaves, small breads, and earth-friendly small baked goods. Experienced bakers and novices alike can take their baking to the next level with gorgeous vegan baked goods from cakes, muffins, and scones to biscuits, cookies, and tarts. Passionate about a vegan lifestyle for the benefit of all people and the planet, the book also includes gluten-free recipes (bread and other baked goods), discard starter recipes to further zero-waste efforts, and an offering of dips, spreads, and accompaniments to complement the breads.
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