Persephone Station

"On the backwater planet of Brynner, at Persephone Station, a community of android refugees, all female, are hiding since they were able to awaken their AI and escape servitude. But the Serrao-Orlov Corporation is nothing if not tenacious, especially about it's proprietary AI's, and it wants their property back. However, Persephone is run by Rosie, and they are in charge of an organized group of beneficent criminals and assassins, along with a bunch of worn mercenaries who have a thing for doing the honorable thing, despite the odds. And in a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation, the odds are not going to be good, but it would be a glorious fight. Award-nominated author Stina Leicht has created a visciously feminist take on The Magnificent Seven by the way of Blade Runner and Westworld"--

Finalist for 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction • Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book After years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing. She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell. Persephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency. It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A look at how 'ordinary' people in London and Birmingham lived, worked and coped during World War II, through the diary of an "ordinary commonplace Londoner."

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES Finalist for CBC Canada Reads 2023 Winner of the Toronto Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award Finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Sunburst Award Longlisted for the Baileys Prize and for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller A Best Book of the Year in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Time magazine An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition, set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse Day One The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Week Two Civilization has crumbled. Year Twenty A band of actors and musicians, called the Travelling Symphony, move through the territories of a changed world, performing concerts and Shakespeare at the settlements that have formed. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the world every hopeful survivor has tried to rebuild. Moving backward and forward in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: celebrated actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan, a bystander warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife, Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend, Clark; Kirsten, an actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed "prophet." Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the fragility of life, the relationships that sustain us, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

According to the ancient legend, the Lord of the Dead kidnapped the innocent daughter of Demeter--or did he? The truth is, Persephone is no damsel in distress, but a spirited young lady with an overbearing mother. A failed scheme by Apollo leads Persephone to a chance encounter with the mysterious and handsome Hades, who is struck by love's arrow. Now Hades must wrestle with his aching heart before he loses total control of his feelings, but desire is raging inside Persepone herself.

Hugo Award–nominated author Stina Leicht has created a “thoroughly enjoyable” (NPR) take on space opera for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop in this high-stakes adventure. Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has been largely ignored by the United Republic of Worlds, becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit. Rosie—owner of Monk’s Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner, caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk’s bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them. Angel—ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed-up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will affect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlove Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doesn’t mean she can’t damned well try.