Miriam Toews4.8 Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015 Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2015 Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go. 'The novel she has written - so exquisitely that you'll want to savour every word - reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times '[Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.' Daily Mail
Андре Алексис0.0 Alexis is a hugely acclaimed Canadian writer, having won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and Trillium Book Award, as well as having been shortlisted for the Giller Prize and Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeAlexis was born in Trinidad, and identifies as a Caribbean-Canadian writer
Стивен Гэллоуэй0.0 A masterful re-imagining of the lives and loves of Harry Houdini, from the author of the Richard and Judy bestseller The Cellist of Sarajevo.
The whole world knows me as the man who killed Harry Houdini, the most famous person on the planet. But there is a secret that no one knows, save for myself and one other person who likely died long ago...
This is the spellbinding story of Harry Houdin
K. D. Miller0.0 In a linked collection that presents the secreted small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by borderline-abusive sex; Owen, “The Shitblood Man,” who, lost in the woods, loses himself in a fit of rage; a receptionist and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.
Praise for All Saints
"Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group—parishioners, priest, passersby—but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections. All Saints is a moving and soulful book."—Caroline Adderson
Carrie Snyder0.0 Girl Runner is the story of Aganetha Smart, a former Olympic athlete who was famous in the 1920s, but now, at age 104, lives in a nursing home, alone and forgotten by history. For Aganetha, a competitive and ambitious woman, her life remains present and unfinished in her mind.
When her quiet life is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of two young strangers, Aganetha begins to reflect on her childhood in rural Ontario and her struggles to make an independent life for herself in the city.
Without revealing who they are, or what they may want from her, the visitors take Aganetha on an outing from the nursing home. As ready as ever for adventure, Aganetha’s memories are stirred when the pair return her to the family farm where she was raised. The devastation of WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, the optimism of the 1920s and the sacrifices of the 1930s play out in Aganetha’s mind, as she wrestles with the confusion and displacement of the present.
Part historical page-turner, part contemporary mystery, Girl Runner is an engaging and endearing story about family, ambition, athletics and the dedicated pursuit of one’s passions. It is also, ultimately, about a woman who follows the singular, heart-breaking and inspiring course of her life until the very end.
