If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives. Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life. In airy prose imbued with humour, this novel asks the big questions: is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstances? In this energetic and innovative book, Leona Theis creates a world without the usual limits and a protaganist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if...?

Imagine that your birth mother gave you away to her own mother and then maintained a strict distance from you. How would you feel? Amber, 24, is trying to salvage a sense of who she is from personal remnants she has collected from those who form a part of her life. Set in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the novel begins in the now, with Amber pulling from her closet her box of treasures, those bits that constitute her life thus far.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller! A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick & Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick! NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY New York Times • Time • Marie Claire • Elle • Buzzfeed • Huffington Post • Good Housekeeping • The Week • Goodreads • New York Post • and many more! “Powerful . . . A twisting tale of love, loss, and dark family secrets.” — Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women—two sisters and their mother—in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes. Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn’t rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love. But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it’s Amy’s turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister’s movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy’s complicated family—and herself—than she ever could have imagined. A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love. “This is a true beach read! You can’t put it down!” – Jenna Bush Hager, Today Show Book Club Pick

"Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life. In airy prose imbued with humour, this book asks the big questions: is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstance? In this energetic and innovative book, Leona Theis creates a world without the usual limits and a protagonist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if . . . ?"--

Winner, Saskatchewan Fiction Award/Saskatoon Book Award; Saskatchewan Book Awards The thirteen stories in this debut short fiction collection weave together the lives of a cast of characters from the small community of Flat Hill over a thirty-year period from the 1960s to the 1990s. Leona Theis uses flashbacks within stories, revisits characters at more than one time in their lives, and has main characters in one story appear as bit players in another, all to build a complex portrait of a group of people who share a single point of departure - Flat Hill. Relationships and friendships thrive or wither, children grow up and move away to the city, seniors pass on, and time moves everyone relentlessly forward - whether they want to go or not. "No matter how accomplished and subtly rewarding each story in Sightlines is, what is finally most remarkable about this book is how the individual stories fit together, demonstrating that in Leona Theis's case the whole really is far greater than the sum of its parts. A very promising debut by a very talented writer."-Guy Vanderhaeghe

When young Vittorio Innocente’s mother, Cristina, is bitten by a snake in the family stable, no one sees the blue-eyed stranger leaving except for Vittorio. He struggles to keep his mother’s secret but secrets in a small village are hard to keep, and while Cristina’s belly gradually grows under her loose dresses, they find themselves shunned by their superstitious neighbours. A classic of Canadian literature, Lives of the Saints has earned many distinctions since it was originally published in 1990. It was a national bestseller for seventy-five weeks, received the Governor Generals Literary Award for Fiction, the W.H. Smith / Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F.G. Bressani Prize. In England it won the Betty Trask Award and Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, in the U.S. was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and in France was an Oeil de la letter Selection of the National Libraries Association. It was also adapted into a miniseries starring Sophia Loren.

WINNER OF THE GLENGARRY BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE CITY OF REGINA BOOK AWARD From the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, an engaging new novel about the unconventional Estella Diamond and her struggle with the expectations that bind her family Estella Diamond is the youngest child and only daughter of a successful brick-factory owner, a self-described family man who is not averse to being called a kingpin. Estella’s precocious nature leads her to discover something none of her brothers know: that their father was once married to an aspiring ceramics artist named Salina, who dreamed big and turned her back on society’s conventions. Estella grows up planning her future in the image of her father’s daring first wife, rather than that of her traditional mother. When her plans are derailed again and again by the family patriarchy, she longs to rebel and be like Salina. Unable to openly challenge her father, and with a chorus of sisters-in-law passing judgment, she does the right thing instead, and plays the role of the good daughter. Until she doesn’t. The effects of Estella’s rebellion will stay with her and the family for years, until she is left alone in the house her father built with only her housekeeper, Emyflor, for company. When an uncompromising young woman named Hannah Diamond enters her world, Estella is forced to wrestle with the legacy she helped create and to confront the woman she has become, just in time for one last reinvention.

The Winter-Blooming Tree draws us into the lives of Ursula Koehl-Niederhauser, a school teacher suffering from lapses of memory who is convinced that she has dementia; Andreas, her charming, well-intentioned but somewhat self-absorbed husband; and their grown daughter, Mia, who is about to move home after bouncing all over the country, trying to find herself as a journalist. Distracted by thoughts and memories of the winter-blooming apple tree in her laundry room, Ursula misses the neurologist's diagnosis and becomes convinced she is falling ill. Andreas, certain that she is fine, refuses to worry her with his own work and health problems. Mia, caught up with her own situation, has no idea that her parents are struggling and can't understand why her mother, especially, is behaving so badly. The Winter-Blooming Tree delves into the dissonance between family members and how sometimes pride is the only thing standing between those we love and the stories we tell ourselves.