Days Days

Governor General’s award-winning author Teresa Toten’s story about one girl’s transformative eight-day road-trip to retrieve her mother’s body. How do you face a heartbreaking past? One day at a time. Or as Aggie says, one crisis at a time. In Teresa Toten’s compelling new novel Eight Days, Samantha finds out that the mother she thought had died years ago has actually just passed away. Added to this charged secret is her recovering alcoholic grandfather’s strange behaviour and sudden insistence that he take Sami back to Chicago to retrieve her mother’s body. Luckily, Sami’s beloved neighbour and surrogate mother figure, Aggie, insists on coming on the road trip, bringing along her quirky sense of humour and fantastic wig collection. The eight-day journey takes us from Toronto to Chicago and back again, as Sami, an American living with her grandfather in a Muslim-dominated apartment complex in Toronto, struggles to find out who she is and where she belongs. Infused with warmth and love, even as family struggles and secrets are torn open, Eight Days is ultimately about forgiveness and strength in community. It is truly a novel for our times.

Cass and her brother Wilbur scavenge in the ruins of a future London seeking an artifact for their Russian masters, but the search takes on a new urgency after the arrival of Erin and Peyto, strangers from afar who claim to hold the key to locating the mysterious object.

Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway? “A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperback Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there…. A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.

THE DAYS BETWEEN Christmas and New Year’s Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A magician called Valerian must save his own life within those few days or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him. Helping him is his servant, Boy, a child with no name and no past. The quick-witted orphan girl, Willow, is with them as they dig in death fields at midnight, and as they are swept into the sprawling blackness of a subterranean city on a journey from which there is no escape. Praise for The Book of Dead Days: “Beautifully paced and sometimes blood-soaked. . . . A very tangible sense of evil.”—The Guardian “Subtle menace and power.”—The Independent “Packed with drama, mystery, and intrigue.”—The Bookseller

Clarissa tries to find her happily-ever-after in this clever, heartfelt follow-up to Love Is a Four-Letter Word! One summer. That's all the time it takes to set your world spinning -- or so Clarissa learns. Feeling abandoned by Mattie (camp), Benji (drama school), and even Michael (babysitting), Clarissa feels even more alone when her mother tells her she's marrying Doug. This announcement gets Clarissa thinking about her father, and her search for answers leads to her stumbling upon information about the secret teenage life of her mother, and more importantly, about Bill, her absentee father. Things get complicated when she spots a man who looks a lot like Bill. Approaching him winds up revealing a whole world of surprises that threaten to shake her image of her mother forever. Will Clarissa be able to move beyond the past and take part in Annie's vision of the future? Happily ever after has never seemed so impossible.

Reginald--better known as "Dutch"--Thompson is a multi-faceted storyteller with unforgettable voices--those of Roy from Murray Harbour North, Adelaide from Bunbury, Gus from Chepstow, and countless others--to tell the stories of the Bygone days in Prince Edward Island [sometimes NS, too]. Stories that, without Dutch's talent and care, might be remembered only by family and close friends or lost altogether. Remember when the train ran from tip to tip and along all the small branches, taking goods, people, and baseball teams to other parts of the Island? How about when ice cream and two pieces of cakes cost 10 cents at White's Ice Cream Parlour on Kent Street? When lobster was not the gourmet's delight it is now and the backs were used to fertilize the crops? That butchering the pig before a full moon will mean less fat on the meat? Or that it was bad luck to cut your nails on Sundays. From CBC Radio to the pages of this book, you'll hear Dutch's voice encouraging these informative, illuminating, poignant, and hilarious stories from the minds and hearts of Maritimers born between 1895 and 1925, almost as if they were all still here and telling them to you.