Monday, September 27, 2010 7:30 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: HENRY OF PELHAM FAMILY ESTATE WINERY

Camilla Gibb

From the bestselling author of Sweetness in the Belly comes this much- anticipated novel The Beauty of Humanity Movement. Set in contemporary Vietnam, this is the story of a country undergoing momentous change and the story of how family is defined – not always by bloodlines but by the heart. Tu' is a young tour guide working in Hanoi for a company called New Dawn. While he leads tourists through the city, including American vets on “war tours”, he starts to wonder what it is they are seeing of Vietnam – and what they miss entirely. Maggie, who is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most her life in the U.S., has returned to her country of origin in search of clues to her dissident father's disappearance during the war. Holding the story together is Old Man Hung, who has lived through decades of political upheaval and has still found a way to feed hope to his community of pondside dwellers. This is a keenly observed and skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption and renewal of long-lost love.

Ruth Rakoff

In the whirlwind of life with three young sons, a force of nature in her tight-knit community, Ruth Rakoff felt in supreme control of her world. But when a routine mammogram revealed a tumour, that wide world rapidly shrunk down to the size of one breast. And so begins the journey of biopsy, surgery, chemotherapy, all accompanied by tidal waves of anxiety and grief: how to tell children? After the mastectomy, should she consider having the healthy breast removed, in case the cancer returns? Will food ever taste good again? And yet, amid all the worry and change, there is overwhelming gratitude for a stalwart network of family and friends who strive to help and support, to comfort and delight – even as everyone longs for the old normal of daily life. More than just a recounting of disease and recovery, this is an intimate and colourful portrait of life lived to the fullest. Through stories, confessions and anecdotes, Ruth Rakoff shows just what is at stake when cancer shows up at the party uninvited. When My World Was Very Small

Monday, October 25, 2010 7:30 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: CALAMUS ESTATE WINERY

Linwood Barclay

A husband whose wife disappears, along with everything he thought he knew about their life together is at the heart of this new mesmerizing thriller by Linwood Barclay. David Harwood, a reporter in Promise Falls, New York, is stressed out. The newspaper he works for is outsourcing jobs to India, he can't get a solid lead on the corrupt for-profit prison moving to town, and his wife, Jan, is struggling with a bout of depression. As a much-needed break, David and Jan decide to take their four-year-old son, Ethan, to a local amusement park for a day of ice cream, rollercoasters, and carefree fun. But revelry is quickly replaced by panic when, within an hour of arriving at the park, Ethan goes missing. Though he is soon found, panic escalates to fullblown terror when Jan suddenly disappears. Confused and worried, David finds himself desperately searching for any clue that could lead him to his wife – even it it means unraveling a tangle of lies and deception that become more complicated at every turn. Never Look Away

Charles Foran

Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charles Foran brings to the pages the richness of Richler's life as a young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. This is the definitive, detailed intimate portrait of Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. Foran's is the first major biography with access to family letters and archives. The portrait is alive and intimate.

Monday, November 22, 2010 7:00 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: MALIVOIRE WINE COMPANY

Michael Helm

In Cities of Refuge, Michael Helm's keenly anticipated new novel, a single act of violence resonates through several lives, connecting close by fears to distant political terrors. At the story's centre is the complex, intensely charged relationship between a 28-year-old woman and the father who abandoned her when she was young. Cities of Refuge is a novel of profound moral tension and luminous prose. It weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry, where mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and the power to save or condemn rests in the forces of history, and in the realm of our deepest longings. “Cities of Refuge thematic breadth pushed Helm into the front ranks of Canadian novelists.” Globe and Mail

Judy Fong Bates

The Year of Finding Memory is an elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives. Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents' past lives in China, a place removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. This is a memoir of a daughter's emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory.

Monday, January 31, 2011 7:00 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: HILLEBRAND WINERY

Trevor Cole

This eagerly awaited new novel from Trevor Cole combines the humour and sharp observations of contemporary life that he is known for with an irresistibly twisted premise. In his first two, Governor General-shortlisted novels, Trevor Cole proved himself a master of drawing the reader into the shadowy side of human nature with sharp observation and warm wit. In Practical Jean, he goes a step further: this is a darkly humourous and revelatory tale of an ordinary, small-town woman with the usual challenges of middle age – a do-nothing husband, a family that refuses to understand her – who realizes her fondest wish is to protect her dearest friends from the indignities of aging and illness. And that's when she decides to kill them...

Kate Taylor

A seductive new novel from the author of the award-winning bestseller Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. At the height of the Belle Epoque, the bourgeois lawyer Francois Dubon lives a well-ordered life. He spends his days at his office, his evenings with his aristocratic wife – and his afternoons with his generous mistress. But this complacent existence is shattered when a mysterious widow pays him a call. She insists only Dubon can rescue her innocent friend, an army captain by the name of Dreyfus who has been convicted of spying. Against his better judgment, Dubon is drawn into a case that will forever alter his life – and tear France herself apart. Kate Taylor artfully mixes mystery and history in this page-turning jaunt through 19-century Parisian society. A Man In Uniform

Monday, February 28, 2011 7:00 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: RIDGEPOINT WINES

Terry Fallis

A brilliant follow-up to the Stephen Leacock Award-winner The Best Laid Plans, this deeply funny satire continues the story of Honest Angus McLintock, an amateur politician who dares to do the unthinkable: tell the truth. Just when Daniel Addison thinks he can escape his job as a political aide, Angus McLintock, the no-hope candidate he helped into Parliament, throws icy cold water on his plans. Angus has just brought down the government with a deciding vote. Now the crusty Scot wants Daniel to manage his next campaign. Soon Daniel is helping Angus fight an uphill battle against “Flamethrower” Fox, a Conservative notorious for his dirty tactics. Together they decide to take “The High Road” and – against all odds – turn the race into a nail-biter with hilarious ups and downs, cookie throwing seniors, and even a Watergate-style break-in. Terry Fallis's second novel is a wildly entertaining read full of deft political satire and laugh-out-loud comedy.

Sue Kenney

The Camino de Santiago is one of the most celebrated pilgrimages in the world, dating back to the medieval times. Sue Kenney, a mother of three daughters and a former account executive with an international high technology firm who became a casualty of corporate downsizing, walked this pilgrimage route covering 780 kms across the north of Spain in the winter, alone. For 29 days she journeyed through intense weather conditions, on a life altering odyssey that revealed many lessons. She walked with an open body, spirit and mind with the intention that this journey of self-discovery would help her find self-love, something she had lost in a society that honours material goals and values. Her stories are told with the grace of a humble pilgrim, engaging the reader with humour and incredible intensity. My Camino

Monday, April 4, 2011 7:00 P.M.
WINE SPONSOR: CAVE SPRING CELLARS

Jane Urquhart

From one of Canada's most celebrated and decorated authors comes the eagerly anticipated new novel Sanctuary Line. Set in the present day on a farm at the shores of Lake Erie, Jane Urquhart's stunning new novel weaves elements from the nineteenth-century past, in Ireland and Ontario, into a gradually unfolding contemporary story of events in the lives of the members of one family that come to alter their futures irrevocably. There are ancestral lighthouse-keepers; seasonal Mexican workers; the migratory patterns and survival techniques of the Monarch butterfly; the tragedy of a young woman's death during a tour of duty in Afghanistan; three very different but equally powerful love stories. Jane Urquhart brings to vivid life the things of the past that make us who we are, and reveals the sometimes difficult path to understanding and forgiveness.