Max The Best Of Braithwaite

If Why Shoot the Teacher, Never Sleep Three in a Bed, and The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car made you smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud, then here (as the man said) is just the book for you! Yes, Max is back! And Braithwaite fans, along with anyone who reads for the warm companionship of a good laugh and some delightful insight, need look no further. Here is Max’s Book of Books – the wit and wisdom of a forty-year career that has won the author hundreds of thousands of book-reading and movie-going fans, and a Stephen Leacock Award for Humour as well. Here is Braithwaite on growing up on the prairies in the twenties and thirties, on the growing pains associated with raising children of your own, on Ontario, where he now lives, on himself, and on his writing career. Each fiction and non-fiction piece in this colourful collection is prefaced by the author with a short introduction dealing with the work itself and the author’s own feelings about it. Together, these personal observations provide a warm and insightful look at one man’s career and personal life throughout a lifetime of writing for and about Canadians. Max: The Best of Braithwaite brings together all the places, times, and faces – pensive, nostalgic, humorous – that Braithwaite fans have come to expect and love. Maximum Braithwaite indeed!

Set in the Saskatchewan prairies during the Depression, Why Shoot the Teacher is the Canadian classic that tells the story of a young man’s first collision with reality: an ill-paid teaching assignment in an isolated country school. This autobiographical novel is riotous, grim, candid, and infinitely entertaining. While it is perhaps Braithwaite’s best-loved book, it is also a vivid evocation of the Dust Bowl desolation wrought by the “Dirty Thirties” on the Saskatchewan Prairies, the ordeal of youth among a people bereft of pity and charity, and the human compassion that adds warmth and poignancy to an unforgettable story.

Max Braithwaite has the unique capacity to be both tender and caustic – both nostalgic and uncompromisingly honest. He is also one of Canada’s few original humorists. All these qualities are present in his latest bittersweet recollections of life on the Prairies during the early Thirties. It was a time of depression and drought; but for Max, a young schoolteacher, it was also a time for courtship and marriage, for those hilarious episodes in Wannego, Saskatchewan, which did much to belie the grimness of the era. There was Max’s disastrous umpiring of a Ladies’ Softball game; his writing and directing of a play that generated more drama off-stage than on; the awful problem of the wasps at the outhouse, and much, much, more. The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car follows Never Sleep Three in a Bed and Why Shoot the Teacher? and completes the story of Max’s early years. It is also Braithwaite at his vintage best – lusty, thought-provoking, and consistently amusing.

A book as rollicking and exuberant as the boyhood pleasures and perils it recalls, Never Sleep Three in a Bed combines humour and realism in a nostalgic but unsentimental journey into Max Braithwaite's—and Canada's past. From the pinnacle of his remarkable writing career, the popular author and humorist casts a perceptive eye over the world he shared with his family and friends in western Canada during the first quarter of the twentieth century. That world comes to life in vivid anecdotes of how things were. Highly entertaining and unexpectedly thought-provoking, this is Max Braithwaite at his impressive best. Never Sleep Three in a Bed is the first book in an autobiographical trilogy.

"Max Braithwaite has the unique capacity to be both tender and caustic - both nostalgic and uncompromisingly honest. He is also one of Canada's few original humorists. All these qualities are present in his latest bittersweet recollections of life on the Prairies during the early Thirties. It was a time of depression and drought; but for Max, a young schoolteacher, it was also a time for courtship and marriage, for those hilarious episodes in Wannego, Saskatchewan, which did much to belie the grimness of the era. There was Max's disastrous umpiring of a Ladies' Softball game; his writing and directing of a play that generated more drama off-stage than on; the awful problem of the wasps at the outhouse, and much, much, more. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car follows Never Sleep Three in a Bed and Why Shoot the Teacher? and completes the story of Max's early years. It is also Braithwaite at his vintage best - lusty, thought-provoking, and consistently amusing."--://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/17408/night-we-stole-mounties-car#9781551996493.

A Nigerian psychologist travels to a remote southern border town to uncover the truth about the murder of three university students in this "original and fast-paced thriller" (Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy). When Dr. Philip Taiwo is called on by a powerful Nigerian politician to investigate the public torture and murder of three university students in remote Port Harcourt, he has no idea that he’s about to be enveloped by a perilous case that is far from cold. Philip is not a detective. He’s an investigative psychologist, an academic more interested in figuring out the why of a crime than actually solving it. But when he steps off the plane and into the dizzying frenzy of the provincial airport, he soon realizes that the murder of the Okriki Three isn’t as straightforward as he thought. With the help of his loyal and streetwise personal driver, Chika, Philip must work against those actively conspiring against him to parse together the truth of what happened to these students. A thrilling and atmospheric mystery, and an unforgettable portrait of the contemporary Nigerian sociopolitical landscape, Lightseekers is a wrenching novel tackling the porousness between the first and third worlds, the enduring strength of tribalism and homeland identity, and the human need for connection in the face of isolation.

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • “A taut and darkly funny contemporary noir that moves at lightning speed, it’s the wittiest and most fun murder party you’ve ever been invited to.” —MARIE CLAIRE Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.