Every month, a new set of book club titles will be highlighted in The Book Club Hub post. This month features stories set in our home country of Canada. Canadian stories offer readers something close to home, which can always warm a readers heart. As fellow Canadians know, a Canadian story can be a universal tale of family, relationships, and the everyday trials that face us all. From small towns to big cities, there’s something familiar for everyone in these stories. Here are this month’s selections:
Thinking the pristine woodlands and peaceful river would give her the sanctuary she desperately needs, Hanna Davidson, a 56-year-old divorcee, flees from southern Ontario to a northern Canadian wilderness. She soon learns that the four-legged creatures lurking in the shadows are not the only predators to fear. There’s a terror outside trying to move inside – or is it just her imagination? When the wilderness closes in and her own sanity is in doubt, her nearest neighbor, the handsome Nelson Everett, is always there offering advice, comfort and sanc-tuary. After she disappears, her family looks sus-piciously at him. Is she an accidental victim of the wilderness or has she been taken?
Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, Eldon. He’s sixteen years old and has had the most fleeting of relationships with the man. The rare moments they’ve shared haunt and trouble Frank, but he answers the call, a son’s duty to a father. He finds Eldon decimated after years of drinking, dying of liver failure in a small town flophouse. Eldon asks his son to take him into the mountains, so he may be buried in the traditional Ojibway manner.
What ensues is a journey through the rugged and beautiful backcountry, and a journey into the past, as the two men push forward to Eldon’s end. From a poverty-stricken childhood, to the Korean War, and later the derelict houses of mill towns, Eldon relates both the desolate moments of his life and a time of redemption and love and in doing so offers Frank a history he has never known, the father he has never had, and a connection to himself he never expected.
A novel about love, friendship, courage, and the idea that the land has within it powers of healing, Medicine Walk reveals the ultimate goodness of its characters and offers a deeply moving and redemptive conclusion. Wagamese’s writing soars and his insight and compassion are matched by his gift of communicating these to the reader.
From award-winning and bestselling author Michael Redhill comes a darkly comic literary thriller about a woman who fears for her sanity–and then her life–when she learns that her doppelganger has appeared in a local park.
Jean Mason has a doppelganger. At least, that’s what people tell her. Apparently it hangs out in Kensington Market, where it sometimes buys churros and shops for hats. Jean doesn’t rattle easy, not like she used to. She’s a grown woman with a husband and two kids, as well as a thriving business, and Toronto is a fresh start for the whole family. She certainly doesn’t want to get involved in anything dubious, but still . . . why would two different strangers swear up and down they’d just seen her–with shorter hair furthermore?
Jean’s curiosity quickly gets the better of her, and she visits the market, but sees no one who looks like her. The next day, she goes back to look again. And the day after that. Before she knows it, she’s spending an hour here, an afternoon there, watching, taking notes, obsessing and getting scared. With the aid of a small army of locals who hang around in the market’s only park, she expands her surveillance, making it known she’ll pay for information or sightings. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants–the regulars of Bellevue Square–are eager to contribute to Jean’s investigation. But when some of them start disappearing, it becomes apparent that her alleged double has a sinister agenda. Unless Jean stops her, she and everyone she cares about will face a fate stranger than death.
The beloved author of bestsellers Women Talking, A Complicated Kindness, and All My Puny Sorrows returns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to perseverance and love in an unusual family.
Fight Night is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv’s absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to “Gord,” her unborn grandchild (and Swiv’s soon-to-be brother or sister). “You’re a small thing,” Grandma writes to Gord, “and you must learn to fight.”
As Swiv records her thoughts and observations, Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously—to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.
Stories set in Canada are always a treat, giving fellow Canadian readers something unique to their perspective of living in the Great White North. From mysteries and thrillers to family relations, Canadians have the same stories to share as others. We here at TBPL are happy to showcase Canadian talent.
Not in a book club? No problem! These books are also available as single copies in our online catalogue.
Book descriptions via GoodReads
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