Book club sets

Mukunda, an adopted orphan boy and Bakul, the motherless granddaughter of the house, grow up together in Bengal. As they grow, their closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with Bakul and he knows that he must return.

Tu' is a young tour guide working in Hanoi who meets Maggie who is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most of her life in the U.S. She has returned to her country of origin in search of clues to her dissident father's disappearance during the war. Weaving the story together is Old Man Hung who has found a way to feed hope and pho to his community of pondside dwellers.

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, an immigrant living in Harlem, lands a job as a chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende's economic situation improves when his wife Neni is hired as household help. But in the course of their work, Jende and Neni begin to witness infidelities, skirmishes, and family secrets. Then, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a tragedy changes their lives forever.

When Stella, a young Métis mother in Winnipeg looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break, a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house, she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected both directly and indirectly with the victim, tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night.

Catalyzed by a nephew's thoughtless prank, a pair of brothers confronts painful psychological issues surrounding the freak accident that killed their father when they were boys – a loss linked to a heartbreaking deception that shaped their personal and professional lives.

This is a debut novel of astonishing wisdom and subtle humour from an award-winning young writer. It is a delightfully off-beat story that features an opinionated tortoise, Winnifred, and an IQ-challenged narrator who find themselves in the middle of a life-changing mystery.

Juliet, Saskatchewan sits at the edge of the Little Snake sand hills. The heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people, and their stories bring the prairie desert and the town to vivid and enduring life. This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.

Meeting at an Amsterdam restaurant for dinner, two couples move from small talk to the wrenching shared challenge of their teenage sons' act of violence that has triggered a police investigation and revealed the extent to which each family will go to protect those they love.

It's 1989, and in the dying years of the Apartheid regime, eleven-year-old Jack Viljee, the son of an Afrikaans father and an English mother relies, on the family's beloved maid, Susie. But the household is upset by the arrival of Percy, Susie's petulant fifteen-year old son. After one particularly humiliating event, Jack betrays Susie and learns that even the most childish act can avalanche beyond his most outlandish imaginings. 

Quirky Eleanor struggles to relate to other people and lives a very solitary life. When she and the new work IT guy happen to be walking down the street together, they witness an elderly man collapse on the sidewalk and suddenly Eleanor's orderly routines are disrupted. A novel about loneliness and how a little bit of kindness can change a person forever.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, Nadia and Saeed meet and embark on a furtive love affair. When their city explodes, they begin to hear whispers about doors that can whisk people far away, for a price. As violence escalates, they decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through it.

Helen O'Mara's life is divided between her everyday existence as mother and grandmother and her internal memories and reflections on her life with her late husband Cal who died long ago aboard the oil rig Ocean Ranger. Then Helen's wayward son John returns home asking his mother to help him decide how to deal with his girlfriend's pregnancy.

In this original blend of memoir, biography and nature writing, Cambridge professor and falconer Helen Macdonald adopts and trains a goshawk called Mabel, a notoriously difficult bird, as a way to cope with the grief of her father's death.

Two pedestrians collide on London’s Waterloo Bridge – Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes – and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. In this delicate tale of love and loss, of cruelty and kindness, we are asked to consider the interconnectedness of lives, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness. 

Tom has been alive for 400 years and is still asking himself "what it is we live for" in this wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.

What happens that drastically changes the lives of lonely widower Michael Turner and the family next door that has befriended him? A tense, intelligent page-turner that is also an unusual examination of grief, responsibility and redemption.

Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. A riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine.

When Lars Thorvald's wife falls in love with a dashing sommelier, he's left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. Determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter Eva, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club.

This roving, cultural history of urban loneliness is centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of concrete and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with another human being? Part memoir, part biography, this book is a celebration of the state of loneliness.

Interconnected narratives tell the story of young Anna whose beloved father disappears during the Depression while working for the mob. Later, during World War II, she becomes the first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, repairing ships under water. Then a chance meeting at a nightclub with a man from her father’s past helps her understand the complexity of her father's life and the reasons he might have vanished.

While a gifted young surgeon is haunted by memories of the civil war that has decimated his Sierra Leone home, a patient relates disturbing stories about the post-colonial years and a well-intentioned British psychiatrist draws all of them into the path of an enigmatic woman.

Despite their differences in age and the upstairs-downstairs divide in the family, Irish maid Ada Concannon strikes up a deep friendship with Miss Emily Dickinson, the gifted elder daughter living a spinster's life at home. But Emily's passion for words begins to dominate her life, and when Ada's safety and reputation are threatened Emily must face down her own demons in order to help her friend, with shocking consequences.

This heartbreaking, yet hilarious novel tells the story of Frank, a local TV news presenter in England. Beneath his awkwardly corny screen persona, Frank is haunted by disappearances: the mysterious hit-and-run that killed his predecessor Phil Smethway; the demolition of his father's post-war architecture; and the unmarked passing of those who die alone in the city. Frank struggles to make sense of these absences whilst having to report endless local news stories and trying to cope with his resolutely miserable mother.

Edward Feathers aka Filth (Failed in London Try Hong Kong), an international lawyer now retired to England, reminisces on his life after the death of his wife. Brilliantly constructed - going backwards and forwards in time, yet constantly working towards the secret at its core - 'Old Filth' is funny and heart-breaking.

A senior-aged widow and widower forge a loving bond over shared loneliness and respective histories, provoking local gossip and the disapproval of their grown children in ways that are further complicated by an extended visit by a sad young grandchild

Jean Vale Horemarsh is an ordinary, small-town woman with the usual challenges of middle age. She's content, mostly, with the life she's built: a semi-successful career as a ceramics artist, a close collection of women friends, a comfortable marriage with a kind if otherwise unextraordinary man. And then Jean sees her mother go through the final devastating months of cancer, and realizes that her fondest wish is to protect her dearest friends from the indignities of aging and illness. That's when she decides to kill them...

Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful – and attempts a nail-biting escape.

Over the span of ten years, seven high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave their reserve because there was no high school there for them to attend. Award-winning journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest, and struggle with, human rights violations past and present against Indigenous communities.

Marina Singh, who has given up her medical practice for the relative quiet of pharmaceutical research, finds her world upturned when she's suddenly sent to the Amazon. A field team there, working on a new drug, has been unresponsive for two years, and Marina's colleague Anders, who has gone to investigate, is reported dead.

Two young Ukrainians discover romance and adventure as they travel the United Kingdom with a group of migrant workers. As they move through the inglorious work places of England they also discover insecurity, hideous working conditions, isolation, sexual abuse, meagre wages and scams. A hard hitting story made palatable by its very funny, sometimes farcical moments.

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided to escape her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying by starting a diary. Across the Pacific, Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island, discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a child’s lunchbox – possibly debris from the 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. 

It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus – her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company. So when he dies of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down. But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life – someone who will help her to heal and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.

When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day he puts on a dress and refuses to take it off and when he grows up, he says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn aren't panicked at first. Kids go through phases, after all, and make-believe is fun. But soon the entire family is keeping Claude's secret, until one day it explodes.

From internationally acclaimed author Joseph Boyden comes an astonishingly powerful novel of contemporary aboriginal life, full of the dangers and harsh beauty of both forest and city. When beautiful Suzanne Bird disappears, her sister Annie, a loner and hunter, is compelled to search for her, leaving behind their uncle Will, a man haunted by loss. While Annie travels from Toronto to New York, from modelling studios to A-list parties, Will encounters dire troubles at home. Both eventually come to painful discoveries about the inescapable ties of family.

Two coming-of-age girls meet at school in Tokyo during the American occupation after World War II. Aya, a repatriate from Vancouver is new to the school, and Fumi, charged with looking after her, has an older sister, Sumiko, who has disappeared. Interwoven with the stories of the two girls is that of Fumi’s missing sister who had become a GI dance girl to keep the family afloat.

Set between the 1930s, and the present, this novel is the story of Esme, a woman edited out of her family's history, and of the secrets that come to light when, sixty years later, she is released from care, and a young woman, Iris, discovers the great aunt she never knew she had.

Coming of age in middle America, 18-year-old Rosemary evaluates how her entire youth was defined by the presence and forced removal of an endearing chimpanzee who was secretly regarded as a family member and whom Rosemary loved as a sister.

The happy, middle-class world of Mahmoud and his wife, Fereiba, implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rise to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, is murdered by the new fundamentalist regime. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba will face an impossible choice.