Catalog Search Results
1) Possessed
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English
Description
Josephine obsesses. Or possessed by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn't promise anything but gives her a taste of intimacy. Josephine is trapped by her elusive lover, her older ex-partner, and her senile, destructive mother. Josephine visits a former quarantine island in Europe after a work assignment promises distraction. There, she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Possessed explores sexual obsession, mental illness,...
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This special 3-book bundle collects three masterful novel by one of Canada's finest writers of literary fiction. A Certain Mr. Takahashi: To Mrs. Hopper, Yoshi Takahashi may be just another name from her daughters' past, but for Jean and her sister, Colette, he stands for much more. Years ago, Mr. Takahashi moved into their Toronto neighbourhood and sent the adolescent lives of Jean and Colette into a tailspin. They weren't content merely to befriend...
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Short Candles is a novel about possibility, choice and acceptance and is remarkable for its insights into human nature. Opening in the 1960s, it spans some forty years in the life of Suzanne Cardinal, who has the gift or bears the burden of foresight. While she becomes a visionary to some people in her home town, to her family she is the difficult child who was unable to warn them of an impending death. But Suzanne has little control over the manifestation...
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Two wrongs may not make a right, but what about three? JP Rodriguez's debut novel is an examination of what it means to live a modern life and the price of inaction in a world where chances at redemption and happiness are all too few. Watched over by the majestic mountains of the Canadian west, the narrator came early to understand that every action creates a reaction, and what goes up comes down usually hard. So he's spent his life in an emotional...
5) Godblog
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English
Description
Circumstances force Dag, a young snowboarder, to give up his sport and to find another way to live. He embarks on two paths, the first a subsistence job as a barista in a coffee mega-chain, where he works hard to be a worker extraordinaire. He also invents an online alter ego who pronounces his own brand of wisdom and rant, expressing what Dag can't in his role of coffee slave. Dag doesn't know who he is any more. Crapped out of his sport. Can do...
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John Munin is a rational man, a gifted Montreal psychiatrist who believes that the soul and psyche are interesting only in dissection. Even relationships are ripe for analysis, and Munin has identified "six elements that are necessary for love." His wife, Cynthia, an aspiring artist who paints only self-portraits, remains unconvinced taht love can be so quantified. More susceptible to Munin's seraching analysis, though, is Penelope, who suffers from...
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The day Pauline sees Ramona's mug shot in the paper, she knows she's going to be called upon to relive the darkest period of her life. Charged with murder, Ramona and her husband, Jim, have also been accused of sexually abusing female victims for years in their home. And when the police discover a stash of scripts for disturbing plays performed years earlier by Pauline, Ramona, and Jim, Pauline becomes a key witness in the trial. Tell Everything follows...
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Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine's Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson's murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute's patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this...
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Ismail Boxwala made the worst mistake of his life one summer morning twenty years ago: he forgot his baby daughter in the back seat of his car. After his daughter's tragic death, he struggles to continue living. A divorce, years of heavy drinking, and sex with strangers only leave him more alone and isolated. But Ismail's story begins to change after he reluctantly befriends two women: Fatima, a young queer activist kicked out of her parents' home;...
10) Reading Nijinsky
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A translator, fed up with translating paperback romances, undertakes the translation of the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer, Leonard Ming. She travels from Canada to Spain to do her work, encountering love and death in the seaside Andalusian town of Almunecar.
11) Planet Reese
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Reese Larkin is desperate to find the perfect mattress. His job is in jeopardy and he's been forced to separate from his wife and children, but he believes that if he can find the ultimate sleep system his life will begin anew. In her seventh novel, Cordelia Strube grabs readers by the neuroses with a dark but wickedly fun story about a former Greenpeace activist forced to turn marketeer who battles against a world in which he is confronted by shift...
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A man of innate taste and discrimination, Edward has become an art dealer and collector of fine antiques and paintings. During his first six idyllic years he was the centre and focus of his mother's existence. Betrayals and unhappiness in subsequent years have led him to form almost fetishistic attachments to beautiful objects, as a substitute for the human relationships that have invariably failed him. Now in his late forties, on a holiday in Sicily,...
13) The Petting Zoos
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Description
In a virus-fearing world, skin hunger can drive you crazy - and human petting zoos can return you to yourself.
Ten years after the deadly virus nicknamed Henny Penny, the world has largely recovered - there's an interim government as well as law and order, and life is returning to normal for the greatly reduced population. But despite effective vaccines, the law still requires people to wear protective masks and gloves at all times in public,...
14) Blood Atonement
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A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BEST BOOKS OF 2022
"Freedman grips right out of the gate with dual timeline narratives that weave together more and more tightly until they meld into a mind-bending twist of a climax." - LORETH ANNE WHITE, bestselling author of The Patient's Secret
In a riveting psychological thriller for readers of Lisa Unger and Karin Slaughter, Grace's healing solitude is shattered when she becomes a suspect in a gruesome series of...
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A mute Mayan girl held captive in a crate in the Guatemalan jungle, a big-city psychoanalyst with a rescue complex, and a journalist with a broken heart are the characters in Sheila Dalton's second literary novel. Caitlin Shaughnessy, a Canadian journalist, discovers that Inez, a traumatized young Mayan woman originally from Guatemala, has killed Caitlin's psychoanalyst partner, Dr. Jerry Simpson. Simpson brought the girl, who may be autistic, back...
16) Hooks
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Description
When West meets East in India, tradition, modernity, and necessity cast disturbing slants on the truth. When Georgia accepts the assignment to research prostitution in India, she enters blithely, confident of her ability to remain objective in the face of the difficult subject matter. Provided with an Indian guide, Karma, Georgia feels that she is in control of her well-being and safety. But India, being India, soon overwhelms her preconceptions as...
17) Surface Rights
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Description
An unexpected conflict forces Verna to re-examine her life. What was it Donald used to say? "When it comes to children, you pay now or pay later. You never don't pay. "Middle-aged Verna Macoun Woodcock returns to the family cottage for the first time in 38 years to scatter the ashes of her husband, father, and twin sister. At first she is alone except for her dad's dog, the lake, bitter memories, and a barely hidden drinking problem. But soon Verna...
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Lilith Boot's life changes forever the night she drowns the flowers in her parents' garden. Frightened by their daughter's odd behaviour, and her recent pronouncements of psychic visions, the Boots send Lilith to a Vancouver mental hospital. It is there that she becomes pregnant, giving birth after her discharge. Years later, Lilith uses her visions to help Toronto police find missing children. At the same time, her own daughter, Lemon, struggles...
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A dark comedy about a young man's aspirations to be something better than he currently is. Frustrated 35-year-old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father's plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac's had dreams of attending the University of Michigan that fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn't stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has...
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Melanie Gordonstone, a cherubic six-year-old, was Daddy's favourite in every way. So Margaret, her jealous 12-year-old sister, drowned her in a backyard pool. Inexperience led young Detective Bliss to attribute the girl's death to accident, but Melanie's mother drives herself mad believing her husband to be the killer. Margaret taunts her deranged mother for 10 years before putting her out of her misery, hanging her from a chandelier in a faked suicide....
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