The Birth House

Spanning the 20th century, Ami Mckay takes a primitive and superstitious rural community in Nova Scotia and creates a rich tableau of characters to tell the story of childbirth from its most secretive early practices to modern maternity as we know it. 'The Birth House' is the story of Dora Rare, the first female to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in a small village in Nova Scotia, she is befriended by Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a kitchen filled with herbs and folk remedies, and a talent for telling tales. Dora becomes her apprentice at the outset of World War I, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labour, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling marriages. When Gilbert Thomas, a brash medical doctor, comes to Scots Bay with promises of sterile, painless childbirth, some of the women begin to question Miss Babineau's methods. After her death, Dr. Thomas doubles his efforts to eliminate midwifery in the area. He sets out to undermine Dora's credibility by blaming her for the death of Mrs. Experience Ketch, a woman who had once sought Dora's care. Gossip follows, the women begin to take sides, and Dora must summon all her strength to protect the birthing traditions and women's wisdom of her community. Gripping and alive with the details of times and traditions long past, Ami McKay's debut is an unforgettable tale of the struggles women faced to have control of their own bodies.

Literature & Fiction

Ami McKay

Contemporary

Vintage Canada

The god of small things, Arundhati Roys debut novel is a modern classic that has been read and loved worldwide equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969 the seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin...

The God of Small Things

ROY, ARUNDHATI

Literary

A Multitude of Sins

A Multitude Of Sins

Richard, Ford

On the tenth anniversary of the date that UN peacekeepers landed in Rwanda, Random House Canada is proud to publish the unforgettable first-hand account of the genocide by the man who led the UN mission. Digging deep into shattering memories, General Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naivete, racism and international politics. His message is simple and undeniable: "Never again." When Lt-Gen. Romeo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993, he thought he was heading off on a modest and straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned and suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in only a hundred days. In "Shake Hands with the Devil", he takes the reader with him on a return voyage into the hell of Rwanda, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings. Woven through the story of this disastrous mission is Dallaire's own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, reconciliation and hope. This book is General Dallaire's personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth and secure in his assumptions to a man conscious of his own weaknesses and failures and critical of the institutions he'd relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to General Dallaire and his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields our peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into the world's dirty wars.

Shake Hands With the Devil : The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

History

Dallaire, Roméo

Africa

Hank Wallins is a broken man working the night shift in a meaningless job. Tormented by the tinnitus constantly ringing in his ears, he sleepwalks through life, too scarred by a tragic love affair to try again. When a madman pushes him into the path of an oncoming subway train, this scrape with death re-awakens Hank to the world. Craving a reengagement with passion, he reaches out to a young slightly cross-eyed Russian beauty who he locates on a website. He ventures by plane to meet the lovely and mysterious Anna in her hometown of St. Petersburg. Anna Verkoskova seeks to flee not only the hopelessness of her economic situation, but also the reminders of her own failed love affair with Ruslan, a womanizing Dagastani rock star look-alike from the Chechen region. Finding no particular reason to dislike the kind, lumbering Hank, she agrees to follow him to Canada. But once she has left Russia behind, she is overwhelmed by homesickness and a dread of disappearing into the grey Toronto winter. Then she receives a frightening note: Ruslan has been kidnapped. She races home immediately, carrying a bag stuffed with cash. Hank’s cash. Held captive and tortured by the FSB, Ruslan has been crippled by his tormentors and injected with N20, a mysterious CIA-developed serum that fills its victims’ brains with the totality of human knowledge, rendering them insane. Ruslan is traded to Chechen radicals and ransomed. As Anna is now associated with a “rich” Westerner, she is now a target for the ransom. Ruslan’s former political disengagement has been replaced by a new sort of apathy, one that renders him a pawn to whomever has control of the omniscient demons in his ears screaming for blood. Returned to St. Petersburg and reunited with Ruslan, Anna quickly realizes that her former lover has been lost to her forever, as has her nation. With few options, she returns to the safety of Hank and Canada and discovers that, with her passion for Ruslan faded, she has room for new passions to emerge. But she also carries with her a life-altering secret. The novel unfolds through the words of a narrator who describes himself as an abomination, yet he is heroic and compassionate, and capable of immense acts of love, including the creation of this very narrative itself–a gift for his unborn half-sister. His horrors have been formed as a result of untold millennia of blood hatred. But it is through his existence that our protagonists transcend their own human culpability. A kaleidoscopic and riotous tale, voiced by one of the most unusual narrators in literary history, Robert Hough’s The Culprits puts shape and flesh to the murky unknowns surrounding a real-life terrorist incident and all that led up to it, shining a light into some of humanity’s most inscrutable sins. This novel is at once a mind-blowing hallucination and a classic love story, exploring the human thirsts for love and passion, for allegiance and trust, and for terrible vengeance.

The Culprits

Humor & Entertainment

Hough, Robert

Humor

Hitman: My Real Life In The Cartoon World Of Wrestling

Bret

HART

If Bill Bryson were to join a Winnipeg funeral home as an apprentice, and if he searched for the meaning of life and death while he was at it, you'd have Curtains - enlightening, full of life in the midst of death, and very funny. "There's a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to civilians, and they're happy with that arrangement. My job covers that gap." At forty-four Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry: is this really the way we want to say our final goodbyes? The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker. Curtainsis about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the heart and head are the last parts to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; funeral directors have been known to dance during the service - out of sight of funeral goers, of course, and with the utmost respect for the dead. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust - or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved - Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century. From the Hardcover edition.

Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training

Politics & Social Sciences

Jokinen, Tom

Social Sciences

The Broken Shore

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction (Australia) Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then. He was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you’ve come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Now all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before. Then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is beaten and left for dead. Everything seems to point to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; everyone seems to want it to. But Cashin is unconvinced. And as tragedy unfolds relentlessly into tragedy, he finds himself holding onto something that might be better let go. From the Hardcover edition.

Temple, Peter

World Literature

A 14-year old girl is raped at one of the Salvation Army summer camps. Twelve years later, at a Christmas concert in a square in Oslo, a Salvation Army soldier is executed by a man in the crowd. A press photographer has caught a suspect on one of the photos of the concert. Beate Lønn, the identification expert, is confused by how the face can change from one photo to the next. Inspector Harry Hole’s search for the faceless man takes place on the seamy side of the city, among those who seek eternal – or just momentary – redemption. And the gunman has not yet completed his mission. HARRY HOLE #6.

The Redeemer (Harry Hole Series)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

NESBO,JO

Mystery

Grainy CCTV footage shows a man walking into a bank and putting a gun to a cashier’s head. He tells her to count to twenty-five. When he doesn’t get his money in time, she is executed. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case. While Harry’s girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame gets in touch. He goes to dinner at her house and wakes up at home with no memory of the past twelve hours. The same morning the girl is found shot dead in her bed. Harry begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery. Nemesis was awarded with the William Nygaard Bursary 2002. It was a finalist for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Novel and for the 2010 Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. HARRY HOLE #4.

Nemesis (Harry Hole Series)

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