ROMANCE FICTION - ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN Helen Zhang hasn’t seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years since the tragic accident that bound their lives together forever.
Now a bestselling author, Helen pours everything into her career. She’s even scored a coveted spot in the writers’ room of the TV adaptation of her popular young adult novels, and if she can hide her imposter syndrome and overcome her writer’s block, surely the rest of her life will fall into place too. LA is the fresh start she needs. After all, no one knows her there. Except…
Grant has done everything in his power to move on from the past, including building a life across the country. And while the panic attacks have never quite gone away, he’s well liked around town as a screenwriter. He knows he shouldn’t have taken the job on Helen’s show, but it will open doors to developing his own projects that he just can’t pass up.
Grant’s exactly as Helen remembers him—charming, funny, popular, and lovable in ways that she’s never been. And Helen’s exactly as Grant remembers too—brilliant, beautiful, closed off. But working together is messy, and electrifying, and Helen’s parents, who have never forgiven Grant, have no idea he’s in the picture at all.
When secrets come to light, they must reckon with the fact that theirs was never meant to be any kind of love story. And yet… the key to making peace with their past—and themselves—might just lie in holding on to each other in the present.
(10 copies)
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NON-FICTION - SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood. Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a persons story should you pay attention to? Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception. The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood
(10 copies)
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SCIENCE FICTION - INTERPLANETARY VOYAGES On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands
(15 copies)
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BIOGRAPHIES - AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILIES Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
(15 copies)
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ROMANCE FICTION - COLLEGE STUDENTS Anastasia Allen has worked her entire life for a shot at Team USA. She has a planner that would most people weep, and a drive that few can match. A competitive figure skater since she was five years old and with a full college scholarship thanks to her place on the Maple Hills skating team, Stassie comes to win. No exceptions. Nathan Hawkins has never had a problem he couldn't solve. As captain of the Maple Hills Titans, he knows the responsibility of keeping the hockey team on the ice rests on his shoulders. But when a misunderstanding results in the two teams sharing a rink, Nate and Stassie find themselves forced together, their two coaches vying for time and attention. Stassie's hatred for hockey players immediately surfaces at the rink. But when Stassie's skating partner faces an uncertain future, Nate looks like her best option to advance in competiton. The pair become stuck together in more ways than one, but it's fine, because Stassie is sure she doesn't like hockey players...right?
(10 copies)
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DOMESTIC FICTION - FAMILIES If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children--four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness--sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
(15 copies)
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BILDUNGROMANS - GRIEF In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place Nat King Cole singing "Unforgettable," Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumors of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on
(15 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - FUGITIVE SLAVES Young Lensinda Martin is a protegee of a crusading Black journalist and activist in mid-18th century southwestern Ontario. One night, a neighbouring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman, whose name is Cash, refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before Cash is condemned. But Cash doesn't want to confess--instead she proposes a barter: A story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of life stories that reveal the interwoven history of Canada and the United States. As Cash's time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed not only about the complicated tapestry of her people's ancestry, but also of her own family history. And it seems that Cash may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny. These two women's life stories weave together love, tragedy, and survival, to map their own unexpected interconnections onto the history of North America in an entirely new and resonant way
(15 copies)
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NON-FICTION - NORTH AMERICA-ETHNIC RELATIONS Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit,…
(15 copies)
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NON-FICTION - FIRST NATIONS IN TORONTO A collection of narratives by and about Indigenous Toronto, past, present, and future. Beneath every major city in North America lies a deep and rich Indigenous history that has been paved over, and ignored. Toronto has seen 12,000 years of different peoples, including the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit, and a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day. With original contributions by Indigenous elders, scholars, journalists, artists, activists, and historians about art, food, health, and more, this unique anthology explores the poles of erasure and cultural continuity that have come to define a crossroads city-region that was known as a meeting place long before the arrival of European settlers. Contributors include political scientist Hayden King, artist and curator Wanda Nanibush, chief Johl Whiteduck Ringuette, poet and broadcaster Duke Redbird, playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, educator Kerry Potts, writer/journalist Miles Morrisseau and photographer Nadya Kwandibens
(8 copies)
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