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The Secret Daughter


Kelly Rimmer - 2015
    As she was taken from me I knew I might never see my daughter again. 38 years later… ‘You were adopted’. Three short words and Sabina’s life fractures. There would forever be a Before those words, and an After. Pregnant with her own child, Sabina can’t understand how a mother could abandon her daughter, or why her parents have kept the past a secret. Determined to find the woman who gave her away, what she discovers will change everything, not just for Sabina, but for the women who have loved her all these years. From the bestselling author of Me Without You comes another touching, beautifully told story about the pain of separation and the enduring strength of love.

In Laws and Play Cousins


Robyn Gant - 2010
    Her childhood friend Tracie is a computer expert whose personal vendetta backfires. Eva is a jurist but uses men to hide her pain and mask her childhood tragedy, and her cousin Tina wears a sweet exterior but takes risks that threaten to jeopardize her professional career. Kevin and Aaron are sexy twins who go to great lengths to get the women they want; and Angelo, gorgeous and ambitious, lets nothing stand in his way to accomplish his career goals, even at the expense of friends.Pilar is a beautiful but naive orphan who overnight is catapulted to fame; and Denene, a woman scorned, is determined to wreak havoc in the lives of those she feels has wronged her in some way. From the heart of Los Angeles to the South of France, In Laws and Play Cousins tells a story about love and heartbreak, success and envy and the price it ultimately commands.

The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love


Jill Conner Browne - 1999
    Since the early 1980s, this group of belles gone bad has been the toast of Jackson, Mississippi, with their glorious annual appearance in the St. Patrick's Day parade. In The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, their royal ringleader, Jill Conner Browne, introduces the Queens to the world with this sly, hilarious manifesto about love, life, men, and the importance of being prepared. Chapters include:The True Magic Words Guaranteed to Get Any Man to Do Your BiddingThe Five Men You Must Have in Your Life at All TimesMen Who May Need Killing, Quite FranklyWhat to Eat When Tragedy Strikes, or Just for EntertainmentAnd, of course:The Best Advice Ever Given in the Entire History of the WorldFrom tales of the infamous Sweet Potato Queens' Promise to the joys of Chocolate Stuff and Fat Mama's Knock You Naked Margaritas, this irreverent, shamelessly funny book is the gen-u-wine article.

Crow Lake


Mary Lawson - 2002
    For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage. Centerstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt’s protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she’s outgrown her siblings—Luke, Matt, and Bo—who were once her entire world. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leapt to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.

The Expendables


Leonard B. Scott - 1991
    This is the story of the men who fought with them -- and the 304 who didn't return.

Sweet Shattered Dreams


Stanley Gordon West - 2005
    Then, just when he's convinced his life has passed him by, Sonny, by a stroke of fate, is given a second chance at living. Can he get it right?  Will he be able to evade the grinding loneliness that stalks him? Will he find a way to overcome the unbearable regret that haunts him? Will he ever risk loving again, to find someone with no good-byes in her heart? And, most of all, will he become the man he always could have been?

Return to Quail Crossings


Jennifer McMurrain - 2014
    She had dreams of Hollywood stardom, not dirty diapers and pigs. But when Robert Smith, a country boy from head to toe, offers her and her daughter a chance at a normal life, reputation intact, Evalyn can’t help but accept. Little does Robert know, Evalyn is keeping a huge secret. While Evalyn’s family members deal with prejudice in 1940s Texas, fertility, changes of the heart, and even a ghost come back from the dead, Evalyn must fight for her family or lose everything she has grown to love.

The Birthday Girls


Pauline Lawless - 2013
    Their friendship has now lasted thirty-five years. As their birthdays all fall in the same week they long ago made a pact to spend each big decade birthday together. So far they'd managed it. Now as their thirty-ninth birthday looms, Angel, a famous Hollywood actress, announces that this will be her last birthday. Terrified of aging, she absolutely refuses to turn forty. So Lexi, the mother hen of the group and an artist, invites them to Florida for a week-long celebration of this, their last birthday together. Brenda, mother to five grown-up children, flies in from Dublin, eagerly looking forward to her first foreign holiday ever. Mel, however, has to be prised away from New York where she is a successful partner in a law firm - she is a workaholic with no other friends or love in her life. The four come together for the celebration but soon things start to unravel and the week ends disastrously. Lexi is distraught. Can their friendship endure? Only time will tell.

Festival Man


Geoff Berner - 2013
    Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, explosive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

Divisadero


Michael Ondaatje - 2007
    In the 1970s in Northern California a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.

The Book of Ruth


Jane Hamilton - 1988
    Winner of the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel, this exquisite book confronts real-life issues of alienation and violence  from which the author creates a stunning testament  to the human capacity for mercy, compassion and love.

Bowling Ball


Escobar Walker - 2013
    From ice-cream defecation to sleazy liaisons in cinemas, you will love BOWLING BALL if you like Irvine Welsh, Chad Kultgen or Escobar Walker.

The Cabin on Autumn Peak (Missing Pieces Book 5)


Danielle Stewart - 2021
    

The Gravity of Love


Noëlle Harrison - 2018
    A vivid, gripping tale of family secrets and lost love."SANDRA IRELAND, author of Beneath the SkinArizona, 1989Joy Sheldon loves the plants that bloom in the desert but dreams too of the sea's elemental wildness. Now, riven by terrible secrets, Joy embarks on a journey to seek her identity and to discover why the sea pulls at her heart.London, 1967Lewis Bell, a young graphic designer, is aiming for the big time if only he can keep his creative spark. But, as his talented girlfriend Marnie adds her own pressures, sixties Soho fast shows its darker side.Ireland, 1989Drawn together, Joy and Lewis fly across the Atlantic to the Irish coast. She's in search of a lost mother; he's looking for a lost love. They need to make peace with the past, themselves and others. But the truths they encounter will transform everyone's lives forever.Bold, intimate and joyful. This glorious novel tells an unforgettable story of love's true gravity.

Mourning Becomes Cassandra


Christina Dudley - 2009
    Whose brilliant idea was this? You think you've got issues. Meet Cass Ewan. After Plan A for her life falls to pieces, she moves in with single friends from church and reluctantly decides to mentor an at-risk adolescent. Never mind that Cass knows nothing about drugs, alcohol, or criminally-minded loser boyfriends. Once Nadina, the prickly, dog-whispering 15-year-old, enters Cass's life, everything is up for grabs. There's new employment at a video game company with a charming fellow mentor. There's the unlikely friendship with her womanizing, atheist housemate Daniel, because who else can she ask about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll? And finally there's the epiphany about her own role in the universe. Where she once considered herself a cosmic unresolved plotline, Cass finds she still has a pivotal role to play.