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The story of two teenagers during World War II (WWII), one a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France, the other a German orphan boy pressed into service by the Nazi army.

The Zookeeper's Wife is a non-fiction book written by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. Drawing on the unpublished diary of Antonina Żabińska, it recounts the true story of how Antonina and her husband, Jan Żabiński, director of the Warsaw Zoo, saved the lives of 300 Jews who had been imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

This is book one of a story arc of 10 books featuring adolescent amateur detective Flavia de Luce. Written by english author Alan Bradley, these are delightful twisty mysteries.

I'm breaking my rules here with a current title but anyone who reads Canadian author Terry Fallis will be delighted with this 2019 title about a teenager and the game of golf.

Excellent summer read. A story of reconnecting to your past and learning some of life's most valuable lessons.

Pure summer escapism from a talented author. A story told between two eras, a modern day man searching to uncover of his grandfather's legacy and a man pursuing a notorious outlaw in the 1930's.

Historically, it has been difficult for women inventors to get credit for work. This book outlines their original thinking and innovative ideas that helped change the world for everyone.

Big Little Lies follows three women, each at a crossroads in their lives. Can be seen as a series.

Critically Acclaimed

Winner of the Governor General''s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers'' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Stephen Leacock Medal, and now a major motion picture, The Sisters Brothers is a violent, lustful, hung-over, and hilarious odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother''s penchant for whiskey and killing, he''s never known anything else. On the road to Warm''s gold-mining claim outside San Francisco - and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse - Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he''s sworn to do.

Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Patrick deWitt doffs his hat to the classic Western, and then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West - and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love

WINNER OF the 2019 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION

In the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible and State of Wonder, a novel set in the rainforest of Ecuador about five women left behind when their missionary husbands are killed. Based on the shocking real-life events

In 1956, a small group of evangelical Christian missionaries and their families journeyed to the rainforest in Ecuador intending to convert the Waorani, a people who had never had contact with the outside world. The plan was known as Operation Auca. After spending days dropping gifts from an aircraft, the five men in the party rashly entered the "intangible zone." They were all killed, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves.

Five Wives is the fictionalized account of the real-life women who were left behind, and their struggles - with grief, with doubt, and with each other - as they continued to pursue their evangelical mission in the face of the explosion of fame that followed their husbands'' deaths.

Five Wives is a riveting, often wrenching story of evangelism and its legacy, teeming with atmosphere and compelling characters and rich in emotional impact.

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review).

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize

Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English

Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction

Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.

October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen — here is the story behind history . . .

Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of one of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly discovered. Soon, secret agents, corrupt police officers, politicians, and former terrorists of the Front de Liberation du Quebec form a mysterious constellation around him, and at the centre lies a complicated and dangerous truth.

In the tradition of Don DeLillo's Libra, October 1970 is a thrilling fictional account of the events that shaped one of the most volatile moments in recent history.

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. The son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is preparing to break some more. Rising from personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where -man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, Wolf Hall re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

Toronto's Cabbagetown in the Depression...North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum. Ken Tilling leaves school to face the bleak prospects of the dirty thirties-where do you go, what do you do, how do you make a life for yourself when all the world offers in unemployment, poverty and uncertainty?

"As a social document, Cabbagetown is as important and revealing as either The Tin Flute or The Grapes of Wrath. Stern realism has also projected upon the pages of a whole gallery of types, lifelike and convincing. He is well fitted to hold the mirror up to human nature." Globe and Mail.

Themed Adult Popular Author Advisory (many, many more not listed)

Adventure/Fiction
Mystery/Suspense
Romance
Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Thriller/Horror

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