Product Description 
A captivating fantasy novel about demons, dreams, and a young woman teaching English in Japan.\n“With empathetic characters, terrifying monsters, and a cinematic feel, 
Yume is a dream that will keep readers awake at night.” ― RICHARD FORD BURLEY, author of 
Displacement\nCybelle teaches English in a small city in Japan. Her contract is up for renewal, her mother is begging her to come back to Canada, and she is not sure where she belongs anymore. She faces ostracism and fear daily, but she loves her job, despite its increasing difficulties. She vows to do her best ― even when her sleep, appetite, and life in general start to get weird, and conforming to the rules that once helped her becomes a struggle.\nMeanwhile, 
yokai feast and cavort around Osaka and Kyoto as the barrier between their world and the human world thins. Zaniel spends his nights walking the dream world and serving his demon “bodyguard,” Akki. But there is a new 
yokai on the scene, and it has gotten on Akki’s bad side. When Cybelle gets caught up in the supernatural clash, she has to figure out what is real and, more importantly, what she really wants … before her life spirals out of control altogether.\nA RARE MACHINES BOOK 
 Review 
Anipare successfully blends Japanese folklore and contemporary life, and readers will be entranced to see the mundane and the mythical collide. This thought-provoking story is sure to win Anipare fans. ― 
Publishers Weekly\nA captivating fantasy in the vein of Alice in Wonderland and Spirited Away, and yet possessed of its own unique vision and executed with precision, honesty, and feeling. Yume is more than a story about dreams and demons, it's about being a stranger in a strange land, and the yearning we feel to connect with someone ... even if they aren't human. ― 
Ian Rogers, award-winning author of Every House Is Haunted\nThe more I read, the quicker I read, and by the end, I struggled to put it down. ― 
Books Outside the Box\nWith a gleaming and uncanny glance at the racial inequality in societies, Anipare creates a dream reality from our fractured, ever-changing world. ― 
Quill & Quire\nYume will leave readers wanting to become experts on Japanese mythology, watch a Studio Ghibli movie (or two), and read more stories from Anipare's otherwordly mind. ― 
The Sarah Berg Blog\nA growing aura of malice paints every successive page of 
Yume, an inevitable, unfathomable collision of cultures, desires, colour, light, and sensation. Rarely does a book shepherd a reader so deftly through the strange and magical while weaving in enough of the familiar to heighten the suspicion that, while this yokai-populated, fearsome Japan exists through the imagination of the author, it might also be found just around the next corner. And if you DO find it, beware! ― 
Jen Frankel, author of Undead Redhead\nA love letter to the strange and nerdy Black girls who are willing to embrace life’s oddities and adventures... a fun and vivacious ride. ― 
Real Change News\n[A] cinematic and terrifying story about a collision of cultures and the human urge for connection. ― 
Helen Walsh, 49th Shelf\nAt its heart, Yume is a compelling story about finding connections ― to others as well as to parts of oneself ― in an increasingly disconnected world. With empathetic characters, terrifying monsters, and a cinematic feel, Yume is a dream that will keep readers awake at night. ― 
Richard Ford Burley, author of Displacement 
 About the Author 
Sifton Tracey Anipare is a Ghanaian Canadian writer who lived and taught in Japan for four years. She loves video games, bubble tea, Japanese coffee mixes, and is an avid collector of stickers and stamps. Yume is her first novel. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
The Wood Where Things Have No Names\nAll things are dreams\nThere is a quiet forest upon a mountain on a spring day. The sky is blue, the grass is a lush green, and the sun is shining. A wide di

Yume

Literature & Fiction

Anipare, Sifton Tracey

United States

Rare Machines

Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book\nAfter years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.\nShe was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell.\nPersephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency.\nIt is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.\nA RARE MACHINES BOOK

Persephone's Children: A Life in Fragments

Biographies & Memoirs

McCandless, Rowan

Community & Culture

The true story of how one Muslim woman shaped her own fate and escaped her forced wedding. Sumaiya Matin was never sure if the story of the Shaytan Bride was truth or myth. When she moved at age six from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Thunder Bay, Ontario, recollections of this devilish bride followed her. At first, the Shaytan Bride seemed to be the monster of fairy tales, a woman possessed or seduced by a jinni. But everything changes during a family trip to Bangladesh, and in the weeks leading to Sumaiya's own forced wedding, she discovers that the story -- and the bride herself -- are much closer than they seem. The Shaytan Bride is the true coming-of-age story of a girl navigating desire and faith. Through her journey into adulthood, she battles herself and her circumstances to differentiate between destiny and free will. Sumaiya Matin's life in love and violence is a testament to one woman's strength as she faces the complicated fallout of her decisions. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

The Shaytan Bride: A Bangladeshi Canadian Memoir of Desire and Faith

Matin, Sumaiya

An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change. With the world's oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed. Stories of Émeraude's ancestors -- a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak -- weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Aquariums

Kurtness, J.D.

Literary

Too much sex in the city: a young woman goes into a self-destructive spiral after becoming obsessed with a downtown Montreal hipster. Reality, that speedy bitch, is catching up to me. In downtown Montreal, everyone is in a band or making a movie. Philomena Flynn and her best friend, Tania, are living fast and hard. There is sex when and where they want it, as well as drugs of all kinds. Not enough work, but lots of parties. Cute boys or nice boys, but rarely both at once. Philomena has no idea how to protect herself from her roaring feelings and goes into a spiral of self-destruction when her heart is broken. Too bad for Tania. Too bad for Philomena's dad. Too bad for boys who are too nice to her, and too bad, above all, for Philomena. Like Animals is a glimpse into the raucous, sex-filled lives -- infused with self-doubt and euphoria -- of young, creative people who are far more sensitive than their cool facades will admit. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Like Animals

Lemieux, Eve

A meditation on the meaning of life in an increasingly global world, from acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Xue Yiwei.\nSet in modern-day Montreal, Celia, Misoka, I is the story of a middle-aged Chinese man who has been living in the city for fifteen years. After the death of his wife, he begins to reflect on his past and how he has ended up alone in Canada, a solitary member of the Chinese diaspora. It is in this period of angst and uncertainty, during the most unusual of winters, that he meets two women by Beaver Lake, on Montreal’s Mount Royal. They, too, have their own stories: stories of their own personal plights, which connect present to past, and West to East.\nThe distinct paths taken by these three characters ― Celia, Misoka, and “I” ― span continents and decades, but, whether by chance or design, converge in Montreal, like mysterious figures in an ancient Chinese Zen painting. After coming together, the three begin to examine who they are, where they might belong, and how to navigate otherness and identity in a globalized world.\nA RARE MACHINES BOOK

Celia, Misoka, I

Yiwei, Xue

"Equal parts Harlequin romance, Gothic horror story and Camusian moral tale." -- GLOBE AND MAIL From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom, comes a story of romantic obsession, mental illness, and self-discovery as one woman travels to a haunted quarantine island. Josephine is obsessed. Or possessed -- by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn't promise anything, but who gives her a taste of intimacy that puts her on the brink of losing her mind. Oscillating between her elusive lover and her older former partner, stuck in the hell that is working in a cubicle, and obliged to tend to her destructive, senile mother, Josephine is trapped. After a work assignment promises to deliver distraction, Josephine makes a decision to visit a former quarantine island in the Adriatic Sea, where she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Intimate and erotic, Possessed is a dark and funny story exploring sexual obsession, mental illness, and the supernatural. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Possessed

Bydlowska, Jowita

Shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award\nA professor of English literature writes the autobiography of his fantasy alter-ego, wanton movie star Gloria Grahame, while his own sexual desires go frustrated.\nDenton Moulton ― a shy, effeminate male professor ― lives inside his head, where he is really a long-dead movie star: the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. Professor Moulton is desperate to reveal Gloria’s shocking secret before he dies. Does he have the right to tell this woman’s story? Who, in fact, has the right to tell anyone’s story at all?\nA scandalous, humorous novel of taboo desires and repression, I, Gloria Grahame alternates between Gloria’s imagined life with her film-director husband, Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, and Denton’s increasingly frustrated real-life attempts to produce his own work of art: an all-male drag production of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The novel takes us from high-strung film sets to dark bars and the puritanical offices of government arts granting agencies, where Denton runs up against the sternest warnings that he may not, in fact, imagine himself as someone else, even in art.\nA RARE MACHINES BOOK

I, Gloria Grahame

Gilbert, Sky

Genre Fiction

In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the superrich. It's 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness "wakes up" in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian. Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her, learning about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse. Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Autonomy

Hetherington, Victoria

In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt ― the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library).\nFinalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First Novel\nSeven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them.\nThe event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness.\nBoth sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.\nA RARE MACHINES BOOK

Seven Down

Whitton, David

Humor & Satire

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Rare Machines publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rare Machines