 The Music Room
William Fiennes
The house was alive with secrets and history, its vaulted passageways, Great Hall and extensive grounds the setting for theatrical presentations, local fairs and international film shoots. Equally fascinating to young Will was his eldest brother Richard, who suffered from disabling epilepsy. The ebbs and flows of electricity in Richard’s brain, along with the mood swings and outbursts caused by the damage his brain sustained, created the rhythm of family life; Richard’s story inspires Fiennes’ journey towards an understanding of the mind. This is a song of home, of an adored and sometimes feared brother and of the miracle of consciousness. |
 A Soldier First
Rick Hillier
In the summer of 2008, General Rick Hillier, Canada’s most popular and controversial military leader since World War II, retired as Chief of the Defense staff of the Canadian Forces.
Born and raised in Newfoundland, Hillier joined the military as a young man and quickly climbed the ranks. He played a significant role in such domestic challenges as the ice storm that paralyzed much of eastern Ontario and Quebec in 1998, and quickly became a player on the international scene, commanding an American corps in Texas and a multinational NATO task force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it was his role as General Rick Hillier, Canada's Chief of the Defense Staff, which defined him as a Canadian icon.
In Afghanistan, Canada faced its first combat losses since the Korean War, with every casualty becoming front page news. There, as everywhere, Hillier pulled no punches, demanding more funding, more troops and more appreciation for the women and men fighting a war on foreign soil. This hard-hitting, honest account of Hillier’s role - told in his own words - is one of the most important books published in Canada this decade. |
Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Chris Hedges
Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion.
Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this "other society," serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture - attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies - exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion. |
 The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture
Terry O’Reilly & Mike Tennant
The ad men behind CBC Radio’s The Age of Persuasion combine lively social history and years of industry experience to show how the art of persuasion shapes our culture.
Witty, erudite and irrepressibly irreverent, The Age of Persuasion provides a hugely entertaining - and eye-opening - insider’s look at the ever-expanding world of marketing.
The Age of Persuasion is for those who say "advertising doesn’t work on me" as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age - from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond. With insider anecdotes and examples drawn from pop culture, they also probe deeply into the day-to-day workings and ethics of a business that is rapidly evolving in the age. |
 Open: an Autobiography
Andre Agassi
Far more than a superb memoir about the highest levels of professional tennis, Open is the engrossing story of a remarkable life.
Andre Agassi had his life mapped out for him before he left the crib. Groomed to be a tennis champion by his moody and demanding father, by the age of twenty-two Agassi had won the first of his eight grand slams and achieved wealth, celebrity, and the game’s highest honors. But as he reveals in this searching autobiography, off the court he was often unhappy and confused, unfulfilled by his great achievements in a sport he had come to resent. Agassi writes candidly about his early success and his uncomfortable relationship with fame, his marriage to Brooke Shields, his growing interest in philanthropy, and - described in haunting, point-by-point detail - the highs and lows of his celebrated career. |
 Nine Dragons
Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in an apparent robbery.
Joined by members of the department's Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad. But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing.
Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems. |
Even Money
Dick Francis & Felix Francis
Even Money is the latest searing, intrigue-filled blockbuster from the best thriller-writing partnership in the business, Dick Francis and Felix Francis.
It's Royal Ascot’s first day, and bookmaker Ned Talbot watches helplessly as a string of favourites come in. With the punters totting up their winnings, he counts his losses. Then an old man steps forward with a very different claim. The father Ned never knew - long ago believed killed in a car crash - is standing before him.
Barely an hour later, Ned’s newly found father is dying in Ascot’s car park. Stabbed by an unknown assailant, he warns Ned, 'Be very careful.' But of whom? Of what? Ned races to discover the truth behind his father's disappearance and sudden reappearance. It’s not just money on the line now. It's lives. |
 Ford County: Stories
John Grisham
Number 1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill. This riveting collection of short stories features an unforgettable cast of characters: Wheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons embark on a bizarre road trip through the Mississippi Delta to visit Inez’s youngest son, Raymond - on death row. A hard-drinking, low-grossing divorce lawyer fed up with his wife, his life, and the law plans a drastic escape after an unexpected phone call. A quiet, unassuming data collector sets out to bring down a flashy casino owner with his skill at blackjack - as payback for the theft of his wife. A stalker hunts victims in a retirement home, a lawyer confronts a vengeful adversary from the past, and a young man from a prominent family is driven off by scandal and fear - but finds unexpected redemption on the wrong side of the tracks. Often hilarious, frequently moving, and always entertaining, this collection makes it abundantly clear why John Grisham is one of our most popular storytellers. |
 Fever of the Bone
Val McDermid
In Fever of the Bone, the sixth novel in the Tony Hill series, we meet Hill’s most twisted adversary to date - a killer with a shopping list of victims, a killer unmoved by youth and innocence, a killer driven by the most perverted of desires. The murder and mutilation of teenager Jennifer Maidment is horrific enough on its own. But it’s not long before Tony realizes it’s just the start of a brutal and ruthless campaign to target an apparently unconnected group of young people. Struggling with the newly awakened ghosts of his own past and desperate for distraction in his work, Tony battles to find the answers that will give him personal and professional satisfaction in his most testing investigation yet. |
Day After Night
Anita Diamant
Just as she gave voice to the silent women of the Hebrew Bible in The Red Tent, Anita Diamant creates a cast of breathtakingly vivid characters - young women who escaped to Israel from Nazi Europe - in this intensely dramatic novel.
Day After Night is based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred prisoners from the Atlit internment camp, a prison for "illegal" immigrants run by the British military near the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. The story is told through the eyes of four young women at the camp who survived the Holocaust: Shayndel, a Polish Zionist; Leonie, a Parisian beauty; Tedi, a hidden Dutch Jew; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor. Haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to hope, the four of them find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country.
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Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer
A hugely entertaining and illuminating tale of love, laughter and the human heart.
Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Venice Art Biennale. He's expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many Bellinis. He's not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city. |
Chronic City
Jonathan Lethem
The bestselling and beloved author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude delivers a searing love letter to the city that has inspired his finest work.
Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life - permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter brings Chase together with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan. Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price. |
Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
Lyrical, devastatingly funny, and beguiling, A Gate at the Stairs is Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date.
Set just after the events of September 2001, it is a story about Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year-old from the plains of the mid-west, making her way in a new world and coming of age. She has come to a university town, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir. In between semesters, she takes a part-time job as a nanny for a family that seems mysterious and glamorous to her. Though her liking for children tends to dwindle into boredom, Tassie begins to care for and protect their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds, she is drawn even deeper into the world of the child and her hovering parents, and her own life back home becomes alien to her. As life reveals itself dramatically and shockingly, Tassie finds herself forever changed - less the person she once was and more and more the stranger she feels herself to be. |
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighborhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.
He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.
This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate, unfolding at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost. |
Winds of Dune
Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson
In this direct sequel to Dune Messiah, Paul has walked off into the sand, blind, and is presumed dead. Jessica and Gurney are on Caladan; Alia is trying to hold the Imperial government together with Duncan; Mohiam dead at the hands of Stilgar; Irulan imprisoned. Paul’s former friend, Bronso of Ix, now seems to be leading opposition to the House of Atreides. Herbert and Anderson’s newest book in this landmark series will concentrate on these characters as well as the growing battle between Jessica and her daughter, Alia. |
The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins transformed our view of God in his blockbuster, The God Delusion, which sold more than 2 million copies in English alone. He revolutionized the way we see natural selection in the seminal bestseller The Selfish Gene. Now, he launches a fierce counterattack against proponents of "Intelligent Design" in his latest bestseller, The Greatest Show on Earth. Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence - from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics - to make the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection." His passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument, exposing the absurdities of the creationist position, into a positive offering to the reader. |
Hector and the Search for Happiness
Francois Lelord
Once upon a time there was a young psychiatrist called Hector who was not very satisfied with himself ... Hector is very good at treating patients in need of his help. But he can't do much for those who are simply dissatisfied with life, and that is beginning to depress him. When a patient tells him he looks in need of a vacation, Hector takes a trip around the world to learn what makes people happy and sad. As he travels from Paris to China to Africa to the United States, he lists his observations about the people he meets. Is there a secret to happiness, and will Hector find it?
Combining the winsome appeal of The Little Prince with the inspiring philosophy of The Alchemist, Hector's journey ventures around the globe and into the human soul. Lelord's writing inspires us to consider life's great questions. Uplifting, empowering, and optimistic, this is a fable for our times. |
Link: Uncovering our Earliest Ancestor
Colin Tudge
For more than a century, scientists have raced to unravel the human family tree and have grappled with its complications. Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums is the scientific find of a lifetime - a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by forty-four million years.
A secret until now, the fossil - "Ida" to the researchers who have painstakingly verified her provenance - is the most complete primate fossil ever found. Forty-seven million years old, Ida rewrites what we've assumed about the earliest primate origins. With exclusive access to the first scientists to study her, the award-winning science writer Colin Tudge tells the history of Ida and her place in the world. A magnificent, cutting-edge scientific detective story followed her discovery, one which opens a stunningly evocative window into our past and changes what we know about primate evolution and, ultimately, our own. |
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