Clutching her small biscuit tin of food, her face almost hidden behind her kerchief, 15-year-old Annie Corches stepped onto the train that would carry her away from Dysart, Saskatchewan, far from the cruel and abusive aunt who was destroying her body and soul. Like her immigrant Romanian parents who arrived in Canada in 1909, Annie was terrified of what lay ahead, but even more so of what lay behind. Annie is Kenneth Radu's mother. The Devil Is Clever is Annie's memoir, told through Radu's evocative voice, an account that sings like a work of fiction, yet is at the same time remarkable for its unvarnished look at a life of strife, courage, and hope. When Annie lost her mother, her father quickly remarried, and Annie's overworked and emotionally distant stepmother hardly had time to nurture a little girl. Yet Annie was close to her older sister, Tenka, who became a surrogate mother. It was only when their father died and Annie was torn from her siblings that her childhood began to crumble. Sent to live with an abusive aunt, she took comfort in her rich heritage. Radu, in a narrative full of the wondrous aromas and recipes of Romanian cooking, draws vivid pictures of savory sarmale (cabbage rolls) and buttery sweet placinta (strudel), pleasures with which Annie defended herself against her aunt's savagery. The Devil Is Clever is a powerful account of prairie life between the two World Wars, of immigrant dreams, and the triumph of hope over hardship. Its indelible portrait of a woman whose search for love and acceptance never wavers confirms Kenneth Radu's prodigious gift for storytelling.

The Devil Is Clever: A Memoir of My Romanian Mother

Biographies & Memoirs

Radu, Kenneth

Historical

HarperFlamingo Canada

One morning, prolific and bestselling crime novelist Howard Engel awoke to discover he had lost the ability to read. He had experienced a stroke that left him with the rare condition known as alexia sine agraphiahe could write, but as soon as he committed his thoughts to the page, he no longer knew what they were. Other effects of the stroke emerged over time, but none were as dramatic and devastating as this one for a man who made his living working with words.
 The Man Who Forgot How to Read is the warm, insightful and fascinating story of Engel’s fight to overcome a condition that threatened to end his career. Engel’s remarkable triumph over his afflictionhe was finally able to write again and produced another bestselling Benny Cooperman detective novel, Memory Bookwill inspire his fans and fascinate anyone interested in the mysteries of the human brain.

Man Who Forgot How To Read

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Engel, Howard.

Psychology & Counseling

HarperCollins, Publishers-

From the Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishop’s Man comes a bestselling classic childhood memoir, full of humour and heartache, set in Cape Breton Island
Linden MacIntyre remembers vividly the day construction started on the causeway. September 15, 1952, was the day that Change—always for the better and always from away—arrived to link his small Cape Breton village with the wide world of the mainland. With its grand promises of jobs and riches and progress, the building of the Canso Causeway also became a potent personal icon for MacIntyre, the road that would bring him closer to the father who was always away.
In a highly evocative memoir—at once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a luminous reflection on fathers and sons—MacIntyre fills his pages with vivid characters. From his grandmother, the Gaelic-speaking Peigeag, who, it was rumoured, had “special powers” that could both cure and curse, to Dan Rory, the father MacIntyre struggles to know and love, these are people who inhabit a time and a place that is on the brink of transformation. No one knows this more than MacIntyre, his narrative voice ringing true on every page, the voice of a young boy both mystified and captivated by the worlds he straddles.
Shot through with humour and humanity, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that sets a new standard for the genre.

Causeway

MacIntyre, Linden

At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg's daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crackup occurred on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. "I feel like I'm travelling and travelling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling toward insanity. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg's journey to comprehend mental illness and his own family, and to rescue his daughter from her desperate downward spiral. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals Sally's effect on those closest to her--her brother, her grandmother, her mother and her stepmother--and, finally, on himself. Greenberg's memorable gallery of characters includes a surprisingly unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish mental patient and a manic classic professor. Unsentimental, nuanced and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is a transcendent memoir about mental illness and the restorative power of one father's love for his daughter.
On July 5th, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.... My first impulse was to blame myself. Predictably, I tried to tally up the mistakes I had made, what I had failed to provide her, but they weren't enough to explain what had happened. Nothing was. Briefly, I placed my hope in the doctors, then realized that, beyond the relatively narrow clinical fact of her symptoms, they knew little more about her condition than I did. The underlying mechanisms of psychosis, I would discover, are as shrouded in mystery as they have ever been. And while this left little immediate hope for cure, it pointed to broader secrets. It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, like a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. --From Hurry Down Sunshine

Hurry Down Sunshine

Greenberg, Michael

Memoirs

The story of a doctor's personal journey with breast cancer. Very insightful, honest and inspirational.

Life in the Balance

Shapiro, Marla

HARPER/COLLINS.

As Jonathan Franzen tells it, he was the kind of boy who was afraid of spiders,school dances, urinals, music teachers, boomerangs, popular girlsand his parents.He had nothing against geeky kids except a desperate fear of being taken forone of them, a fate which would result in instant Social Death. Approachingpuberty the way a fraud artist confronts a particularly tough scam, he pretended tobe a kid who naturally said “shit” and who didn’t enjoy calculations on his new six functionTexas Instrument calculator.
The Discomfort Zone is Franzen’stale of growing up squirming in his own über-sensitive skin. It’s a multi-layeredtour de force that daringly cascades from single moments into a domino-like discourseof sometimes truculent, sometimes piercing, always entertaining investigationand insight. Whether he’s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christianyouth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’s fiction on his own protractedquest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between birdwatching, hisall-consuming marriage and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelinglyengaged with the world we live in now. Franzen’s personal history of a Midwesternyouth and New York adulthood is warmed by the same blend of comic scrutinyand affection that characterize his fiction; the result is an arresting portrait of aman, his family and his time.

The Discomfort Zone

Franzen, Jonathan.

Part coming-of-age autobiography and part nature guide, Gerald Durrell’s dazzling sequel to My Family and Other Animals is based on his boyhood on Corfu, from 1933 to 1939. Originally published in 1969 but long out of print, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is filled with charming observations, amusing anecdotes, boyhood memories, and childlike wonder.

Birds, beasts and relatives

Science & Math

Durrell, Gerald Malcolm

Biological Sciences

Collins.

Richard Mabey's bestselling guide has now been updated. It explores the history and folklore of foods we can find in the wild as well as explaining how we identify them and the best ways to cook and eat them.

Food for free

Travel

MABEY, Richard

Europe

Golden bats and pink pigeons

1 OVERSIZE HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST COVER

Desert, marsh, and mountain: The world of a nomad

Thesiger, Wilfred

Travel Writing

William Collins Sons

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