Sister Crazy

Richler, Emma

Knopf Canada

Koba the Dread : Laughter and the Twenty Million

Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, a leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

Amis,Martin

At the centre of The Navigator of New York is the rivalry between Robert Peary and Frederick Cook to be the first American to reach the North Pole. Its protagonist, however, is Devlin Stead, a young man from St John's, Newfoundland. Devlin's mother dies, in mysterious circumstances, when he is only five, and he endures a lonely childhood before discovering the truth about his parentage. That discovery transforms his life: he finds his true father and embarks on a journey of unbelievable risk. His adventure brings him celebrity, acclaim from New York 'society', real love, and finally the truth about the bitter feud between two strange, driven men.

The Navigator of New York

Literature & Fiction

Johnston, Wayne

Contemporary

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for "The Guardian" beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.' And he has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Place of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ...Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

History

Americas

In this new twist on a topic of perennial interest, Joe MacInnis shows how the leadership traits forged in extraordinary circumstances are transferrable to our everyday lives. Simply put, this is a handbook for building character. Some people are born leaders. The rest of us find ourselves in positions where leadership is required. Self-described "accidental leader" Dr. Joe MacInnis found himself in such a situation: deep beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean. Starting with his undersea explorations, this physician, scientist, author and motivational speaker shares an accessible--and obtainable--list of leadership traits inspired by his own journey and the icons he's learned from over the years. Deep Leadershipis an eminently digestible book with short lessons and anecdotes. Think Reworkmeets Iacocca. Its centre is the author's 12 "Essential Traits of Leadership": Cool Competence, Powerful Presentations, Physical Toughness, Hot-Zone Humour, Mental Resilience, Strategic Imagination, High-Empathy Communication, Enduring Trust, Fierce Ingenuity, Team Genius, Resolute Courage and Warrior's Honour. Each trait is communicated with an anecdote from MacInnis's experience, making it totally memorable. MacInnis also gives the reader a primer to navigate his or her own path toward leadership, including such practices as keeping a journal, building a library, and finding mentors.

Deep Leadership: Essential Insights from High-Risk Environments

Business & Money

MacInnis, Joe

Business Culture

Once We Had a Country

A richly textured novel of idealism and romance, Once We Had a Country re-imagines the impact of the Vietnam War by way of the women and children who fled with the draft dodgers. It's the summer of 1972. Maggie, a young schoolteacher, leaves the United States to settle with her boyfriend, Fletcher, on a farm near Niagara Falls. Fletcher is avoiding the Vietnam draft, but they've also come to Harroway with a loftier aim: to start a commune, work the land and create a new model for society. Hopes are high for life at Harroway; equally so for Maggie and Fletcher's budding relationship, heady as it is with passion, jealousy and uncertainty. As the summer passes, more people come to the farm--just not who Maggie and Fletcher expected. Then the US government announces the end of the draft, and Fletcher faces increasing pressure from his family to return home. At the same time, Maggie must deal with the recent disappearance of her father, a missionary, in the jungle of Laos. What happened in those days before her father vanished, and how will his life and actions affect Maggie's future? Once We Had a Country is a literary work of the highest order, a novel that re-imagines an era we thought we knew, and that compels us to consider our own belief systems and levels of tolerance.

McGill, Robert

Literary

From one of our greatest, a panoramic new novel, his first since Museum of Innocence, bringing us into Istanbul's underground through the eyes of a struggling street vendor. Mevlut, an Istanbul street vendor, has spent his whole life selling a local alcoholic drink. It is the 1990s, and although there were once thousands of boza vendors walking the frozen streets of the city, Mevlut now cuts a lonely figure on snowy winter nights. Falling deeply into debt, and desperate to marry off his incompetent son and satisfy his mistress, Mevlut turns to his old friend Ferhat, who collects payments on electric bills. The partners traverse the back streets of middle class neighbourhoods and shantytowns, venture into flats, shops and restaurants of the poor, relishing their power to punish cheaters and collect bribes. The dangers of Instanbul's underbelly eventually catch up with Mevlut, and he is attacked by a pack of dogs, hospitalized, robbed by bandits and beaten and threatened at every turn. Istanbul is exposed as a city with a rich and dynamic underground culture which seeps into its secular business centres and mainstream society. Mevlut serves as a flighty guide, occasionally attuned to the city's nuances, but with a wild imagination and insticts tainted by desperation.

A Strangeness in My Mind: A novel

PAMUK, ORHAN

Blood and Daring will change our views not just of Canada's relationship with the United States, but of the Civil War, Confederation and Canada itself. In Blood and Daring, lauded historian John Boyko makes a compelling argument that Confederation occurred when and as it did largely because of the pressures of the Civil War. Many readers will be shocked by Canada's deep connection to the war--Canadians fought in every major battle, supplied arms to the South, and many key Confederate meetings took place on Canadian soil. Boyko gives Americans a new understanding of the North American context of the war, and also shows how the political climate of the time created a more unified Canada, one that was able to successfully oppose American expansion. Filled with engaging stories and astonishing facts from previously unaccessed primary sources, Boyko's fascinating new interpretation of the war will appeal to all readers of history. Blood and Daring will change our views not just of Canada's relationship with the United States, but of Confederation itself.

Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation

Boyko, John

John le Carré is still at the top more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. Written with exclusive access to le Carré, his personal archives, and many of the people closest to him, Adam Sisman's definitive biography is a highly readable, fascinating portrait of the life, times and espionage career that inspired a literary master. Always secretive about his background and Secret Service career (blocking one biography from publication in the 1990s, then choosing a biographer who abandoned the project), John le Carré (David Cornwell) has finally given his blessing to Adam Sisman, who has delivered a biography that reads like a novel. From his bleak childhood--the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by "sixteen hugless years" in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man--through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, his years as an agent for British Intelligence during the Cold War, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. His acute psychological renderings of undercover operations and the moral ambiguities of the Cold War and our present-day politics lend his novels a level of credibility that is unmistakable. Sisman's great biography uncovers for us the remarkable story of an enigmatic writer whose commercial success has sometimes overshadowed appreciation for his extraordinary abilities.

John le Carré: The Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Sisman, Adam

Arts & Literature

The true story of one indomitable woman caught in the tumult of an extraordinary century in Ethiopia, The Wife's Tale has the sweep and lyrical power that captivated readers of Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over her lifetime her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. The Wife's Tale is an intimate memoir, of both a life and a country. In prose steeped in Yetemegnu's distinctive voice and point of view, Aida Edemariam retells her grandmother's stories of a childhood surrounded by proud priests and soldiers, of her husband's imprisonment, of her fight for justice--all of it played out against the rhythms of the natural world and an ancient cycle of religious festivals. She introduces us to a rich cast of characters--emperors and empresses, scholars and nuns, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents--and through these encounters takes us deep into the landscape and culture of this many-layered, often mischaracterized country.

The Wife's Tale: A Personal History

Edemariam, Aida

Community & Culture

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