Sister Crazy

Emma Richler

Knopf Canada

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

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

History

BOYKO, John

Americas

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

“My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” John Irving’s new novel is a glorious ode to sexual difference, a poignant story of a life that no reader will be able to forget, a book that no one else could have written. Told with the panache and assurance of a master storyteller, In One Persontakes the reader along a dizzying path: from a private school in Vermont in the 1950s to the gay bars of Madrid’s Chueca district, from the Vienna State Opera to the wrestling mat at the New York Athletic Club. It takes in the ways that cross-dressing passes from one generation to the next in a family, the trouble with amateur performances of Ibsen, and what happens if you fall in love at first sight while reading Madame Bovaryon a troop transport ship, in the middle of an Atlantic storm. For the sheer pleasure of the tale, there is no writer alive as entertaining and enthralling as John Irving at his best. But thisis also a heartfelt, intimate book about one person, a novelist named William Francis Dean. By his side as he tells his own story, we follow Billy on a fifty-year journey toward himself, meeting someuniquely unconventional characters along the way. For all his long and short relationships with both men and women, Billy remains somehow alone, never quite able to fit into society’s neat categories. And as Billy searches for the truth about himself, In One Persongrows into an unforgettable call for compassion in a world marked by failures of love and failures of understanding. Utterly contemporary and topical in its themes, In One Personis one of John Irving’s most political novels. It is a book that grapples with the mysteries of identity and the multiple tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, a book about everything that has changed in our sexual life over the last fifty years and everything that still needs to. It’s also one of Irving’s most sincere and human novels, a book imbued on every page with a spirit of openness that expands and challenges the reader’s world. A brand new story in a grand old tradition, In One Personstands out as one of John Irving’s finest works – and as such, one of the best and most important American books of the last four decades.

In One Person

IRVING, JOHN.

John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of North America's most admired and beloved storytellers in this absorbing novel of fate and memory. As we grow older--most of all, in what we remember and what we dream--we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. "An aura of fate had marked him," John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. "The chain of events, the links in our lives--what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do--all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious." Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past--in Mexico--collides with his future.

Avenue of Mysteries

United States

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