Recommended Reads

Home / Recommended Reads

Librarian Hidden Gems

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.

Critically Acclaimed

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.

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

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

Font Resize

Contrast