Monday, September 28, 2009 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Wayne Gretzky Estate Winery
- Michael Crummey
- Galore, sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, is Michael Crummey’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date. An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the people of Paradise Deep persist in a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish. Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Sellers and Devine families through generations, Galore is alive with singular characters, and an uncommon insight into the complexities of human nature.
- Linden MacIntyre
- From an award-winning writer and one of Canada’s foremost broadcast journalists, comes a deeply wise and moving novel that explores the guilty minds and spiritual evasions of Catholic priests. Father Duncan MacAskill has spent most of his priesthood as the "Exorcist – an enforcer employed by his bishop to discipline wayward priests and suppress potential scandal. He knows all the devious ways that lonely priests persuade themselves that their needs trump their vows, but he’s about to be sorely tested himself. While sequestered by his bishop in a small rural parish to avoid an impending public controversy, Duncan must confront the consequences of past cover-ups and the suppression of his own human needs.
Monday, October 26, 2009 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Calamus Estate Winery
- Lawrence Hill
- A mesmerizing, utterly compelling journey into the heart of slavery, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is destined to become a contemporary classic. "Inside a world of brutality, a powerful spirit is evoked with such sensitivity and lyricism that it is impossible not to be deeply moved, and impossible to stop reading.” Lawrence Hill has embodied the narrator completely, and the reader in turn feels intimately connected to this wondrous woman. "Stylistically flawless, thematically layered and historically fascinating, this novel is a masterpiece." -Edeet Ravel. Winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize and The Rogers’’ Writers Trust Awards.
- Cathy Marie Buchanan
- Steeped in the intriguing history of Niagara Falls,The Day the Falls Stood Still is a transformative love story and an absorbing chronicle. Loosely based on historical events surrounding the life of Niagara’s most famous riverman,William "Red” Hill, this is an epic love story as rich, lush and majestic as the falls themselves. The year is 1915, the dawn of the hydroelectric era in Niagara Falls. Seventeen year- old Elizabeth Heath has led a life of comfort and ease as the privileged younger daughter of the director of the Niagara Power Company. But when tragedy leaves her beautiful sister dead and her family disgraced, Bess’s life is transformed beyond imagining.
Monday, November 16, 2009 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Ridgepoint Wines
- John Bemrose
- The Last Woman, the eagerly awaited novel by The Giller Prize- shortlisted, bestselling author of The Island Walkers. In the heart of cottage country in Ontario, bordering on a native reservation, Ann and Richard are confronted with the abrupt reappearance after ten years of a local man, Billy. His presence once again in their lives brings back powerful memories and rekindles old conflicts, love and a betrayal, as each of their past and present stories gradually unfolds during one 1980s summer. The Last Woman envelops us in Bemrose’s flawlessly crafted and complete world, where each character is unforgettably alive and real.
- Catherine Gildiner
- After the Falls, the highlyanticipated follow-up to the much-loved, bestselling memoir Too Close to the Falls. Catherine Gildiner recounts her remarkable coming-of-age in the 1960s with the same wit, candour and exhilarating storytelling that has made Too Close to the Falls a modern classic. When Cathy McClure is thirteen years old, her parents make the bold decision to move to Buffalo in hopes that it will help Cathy focus on her studies and stay out of trouble. But "normal” has never been Cathy’s forte, and leaving Niagara Falls behind does nothing to quell her spirited nature. Cathy takes on many personas but when tragedy strikes, it is her role as daughter that proves to be most challenging.
Monday, January 18, 2010 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Malivoire Wine Company
- Karen Connelly
- A compelling, candid travel memoir from Karen Connelly, author of the bestseller The Lizard Cage. Burmese Lessons is a love story. Unlike conventional love stories, this one takes the reader into a world as dangerous and heartbreaking as it is enchanting. When she finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggles for political change.
- Bonnie Burnard
- Suddenly, the long-awaited novel from the Giller Prize-winning, #1 bestselling author of A Good House. A phone call in the night, an unexpected diagnosis – suddenly, life can change forever. Sandra, Colleen and Jude have been friends for nearly a lifetime. They share sexual secrets, counsel on marriage, and even decorating tips. Despite their differences and occasional snarls, the friendship only grows stronger over time, and their partners go along with it, letting this union shape their lives. Now, with Sandra’s crisis, everyone must find a way to endure the present and imagine the future. Sweeping through and beyond the second half of the 20th century the novel creates an astonishingly intimate portrait of three women balanced on the knife edge of middle age.
Monday, February 22, 2010 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Henry of Pelham Family Estate Winery
- Jane Christmas
- From the author of What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim comes her latest Incontinent on the Continent: My Mother, Her Walker and our Grand Tour of Italy, a wickedly irreverent travelogue that shines light on the mother-daughter experience. To smooth over five decades of constant clashing, Christmas takes her arthritic, incontinent, and domineering mother, Valeria – a cross between Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances – on a tour of Italy. As they tour they revisit the bickering and bitterness of years past and reassess who they are and how they might reconcile their differences. "Show me a mother who says she has a good or great relationship with her daughter and I’ll show you a daughter who is in therapy trying to understand how it all went so horribly wrong.”
- Cordelia Strube
- From the author of Planet Resse comes her latest, Lemon. Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she’s never met, her adopted father’s suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn’t left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protege, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can’t be bothered trying to fit in. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities. But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn’t mean that these things don’t find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.
Monday, March 22, 2010 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Hillibrand Estates Winery
- Annabel Lyon
- From Annabel Lyon, the only author this year to be nominated for the three top fiction prizes in Canada and winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize comes the best-selling novel, The Golden Mean. As The Golden Mean opens, Aristotle must postpone his dream of succeeding Plato at the Academy in Athens when he is forced to tutor Alexander, a prince of Macedon. At first the philosopher is appalled at living in the brutal backwater of his childhood, but soon he is drawn to the boy’s intellectual potential and his capacity for surprise. But is Aristotle’s mind any match for the warrior culture that is Alexander’s birthright? Exploring a fabled time and place, Annabel Lyon tells her story, breathtakingly, in the earthy, frank, and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself.With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle’s genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world. And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.“In Lyon’s clever hands, more than two thousand years of difference are made to disappear and Aristotle feels as real and accessible as the man next door.” “An exhilarating book, both brilliant and profound.” “ Impeccably researched and brilliantly told, this novel is utterly convincing.”
- Alan Bradley
- From the best selling author of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie comes Alan Bradley’s latest story of Flavia de Luce, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. Flavia didn't intend to investigate another murder — but, then again, Rupert Porson didn't intend to die.When the master puppeteer's van breaks down in Bishop's Lacey, he puts on a show with his loyal assistant and while she plays Mother Goose, Rupert's goose gets cooked, the victim of an electrocution that is too perfectly planned to be an accident. Putting aside her chemistry experiments, Flavia uncovers long buried secrets of Bishop's Lacey, a seemingly idyllic town. It's possible the police won't be able to solve Porson’s murder. It's possible that his killer may help guide Flavia in way over her eleven-year-old head, and to a startling discovery that reveals the chemical composition of vengeance. "While Flavia De Luce is winning your heart, she may also be poisoning your tea. She's the most wickedly funny sleuth in years, brilliant, unpredictable, unflappable — and only eleven.”
Monday, April 26, 2010 7:30 P.M.
This evening’s wines sponsored by Cave Spring Cellars
- Anne Michaels
- The Winter Vault is the long-awaited novel by the internationally celebrated author of award-winning Fugitive Pieces. The Winter Vault is a stunning, richly layered, and timeless novel set in Canada and Egypt, and with flashbacks to England and Poland after the war. It is a spell-binding love story that juxtaposes momentous historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives. Breathtaking, vivid in its exploration of both the physical and emotional worlds of its characters, intensely moving and lyrical. "Unfailingly eloquent … Set aside your spring chores and cancel the rest of your plans when you pick up The Winter Vault … When you finish, you’ll want to turn back and read it all again … Unforgettable.
- Claire Letemendia
- The Best of Men is the riveting historical debut thriller from Claire Letemendia. It is 1642, and Laurence Beaumont has just returned to England after six long years fighting in the European Wars. As the clashes between King Charles I and his mutinous Parliament come to a crisis and England is thrown into civil war, a reluctant Beaumont is drawn back into the world of warfare and intrigue … " Exciting, heady stuff with a fast-paced, wild plot and a swarthy, wonderfully attractive main character. If you want to discover how spies operated … or visit a bawdy house or drink in a tavern, or fight a duel — this is the book for you … The plot will ensnare you.”