Book picks similar to
Great Village by Mary Rose Donnelly
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Too Close to the Falls
Catherine Gildiner - 1999
It is the mid-1950s in Lewiston, New York, a sleepy town near Niagara Falls. Divorce is unheard of, mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon, and television has only just arrived.At the tender age of four, Cathy accompanies Roy, the deliveryman at her father's pharmacy, on his routes. She shares some of their memorable deliveries-sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe (in town filming Niagara), sedatives to Mad Bear, a violent Tuscarora chief, and fungus cream to Warty, the gentle operator of the town dump. As she reaches her teenage years, Cathy's irrepressible spirit spurs her from dangerous sled rides that take her "too close to the Falls" to tipsy dances with the town priest.
Our Lady of the Lost and Found: A Novel of Mary, Faith, and Friendship
Diane Schoemperlen - 2001
Dressed in a navy blue trench coat and white Nikes, the woman introduces herself as Mary. Mother of God.... You know. Mary. Instead of a golden robe or a crown, she arrives bearing a practical wheeled suitcase. Weary after two thousand years of adoration and petition, Mary is looking for a little R & R. She's asked in for lunch, and decides to stay a week. As the story of their visit unfolds, so does the story of Mary-one of the most complex and powerful female figures of our time-and her changing image in culture, art, history, as well as the thousands of recorded sightings that have placed her everywhere from a privet hedge to the dented bumper of a Camaro.As this Everywoman and Mary become friends, their conversations, both profound and intimate, touch upon Mary's significance and enduring relevance. Told with humor and grace, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is an absorbing tour through Mary's history and a thoughtful meditation on spirituality, our need for faith, and our desire to believe in something larger than ourselves.
Just Once
Lori Handeland - 2018
It's her ex-husband, Charley Blackwell: a man she hasn't seen for nearly a quarter of a century. What's baffling is that Charley seems to think they are still married, and has no recollection of his current wife, Hannah. When medical tests reveal shocking findings, Frankie finds herself reluctantly caring for the man who left her twenty years earlier, while Hannah is relegated to the sidelines. How can Frankie forgive the man who abandoned her when she needed him most? And how can Hannah cope with the impending death of the man she's loved for the past twenty years - especially now she is faced with the shattering truth that he has never stopped loving his first wife, Frankie?
An Autumn in Paris
Alix Nichols
No matter how hot his kisses or how genuine his affection, he’s still reeling. He can’t move on.And I can’t risk falling for him. I have a child to raise—a preteen boy who needs his mom to be all there. But as autumn strips the trees of their leaves, falling for Thomas is exactly what I do. Throwing caution to the wind, I dare to hope for a future with him……until the past comes knocking.Can we handle it or will it break us forever?Whether you're a fan of timeless movies like “Sabrina” or prefer steamy contemporary romance novels, “An Autumn in Paris” has something for you to love.Escape to Paris, and let this sweet, fun and sensual tale give you all the feels!
Weather or Knot
Tracy Brogan - 2019
So when the Chanel 7 news director sends her on assignment to join a team of adrenaline-loving, tornado-seeking storm chasers, she's beyond thrilled. Live weather segments from the road is just what Allison needs to boost her on-air visibility and land that promotion she's been working toward. There's just one problem. Dylan Parks. Her one-time fiancé and the man she's never quite forgotten.The last time Dylan Parks saw Allie Winters, she'd just returned his engagement ring and twisted his heart like an F5 tornado. Now here she was in the back of his tech-laden SUV looking more beautiful than ever, and expecting to spend the week with him and his team. In the five years since their break-up, Dylan has worked hard at establishing his career - and he's worked even harder at getting over the love of his life. Neither was easy, and her surprise appearance has left him as unstable as a springtime weather system in Kansas.Long days spent chasing ominous clouds give way to nostalgic evenings that stir up long-buried emotions, but can Dylan and Allie leave behind their turbulent history in the hopes that love, like lightning, sometimes strikes twice?***Includes an excerpt of Tracy Brogan's new release THE NEW NORMAL***
Sofie & Cecilia
Katherine Ashenburg - 2018
For readers of Elena Ferrante and Paula McLain, Canadian English rights sold to Lynn Henry of Knopf Canada for New Face of Fiction, Spring 2018, by Samantha Haywood of the Transatlantic Agency.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
M.G. Vassanji - 2003
Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren of an Indian railroad worker, search for their place in a world sharply divided between Kenyans and the British. We follow Vic from a changing Africa in the fifties, to the hope of the sixties, and through the corruption and fear of the seventies and eighties. Hauntingly told in the voice of the now exiled Vic, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is an acute and bittersweet novel of identity and family, of lost love and abiding friendship, and of the insidious legacy of the British Empire.--back cover
The Super Secret Book
Tian En - 2020
The Super Secret is a team of six young superheroes who take down bad guys with their high-tech gadgets and unparalleled combat skills, but when a powerful, mysterious diamond falls into the hands of a vengeful supervillain, they are forced into the biggest fight of their lives and must reconsider what it means to be a superhero before it's too late…
Loving and Giving
Molly Keane - 1988
Maman is beautiful and adored. Dada, silent and small, mooches contendedly around the stables. Aunt Tossie, of the giant heart and bosom, is widowed but looks splendid in weeds. The butler, the groom, the landsteward, the maids, the men - each as a place and knows it. Then, astonishingly, the perfect surface is shattered; Maman does something too dreadful ever to be spoken of.'What next? Who to love?' asks Nicaranda. And through her growing up and marriage her answer is to swamp those around her with kindness - while gradually the great house crumbles under a weight of manners and misunderstanding.
In the Land of Armadillos: Stories
Helen Maryles Shankman - 2016
With the Nazi Party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland’s towns and cities of their Jewish populations. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland has become a moral quagmire—a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.Blending folklore and fact, Helen Maryles Shankman shows us the people of Wlodawa, a remote Polish town: we meet a cold-blooded SS officer dedicated to rescuing the creator of his son’s favorite picture book, even as he helps exterminate the artist’s friends and family; a Messiah who appears in a little boy’s bedroom to announce that he is quitting; a young Jewish girl who is hidden by the town’s most outspoken anti-Semite—and his talking dog. And walking among these tales are two unforgettable figures: the enigmatic and silver-tongued Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the forced labor camp who has grand schemes to protect “his” Jews, and Soroka, the Jewish saddlemaker and his family, struggling to survive.
Between
Angie Abdou - 2014
They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in help with their sons―a woman from the Philippines named Ligaya (which means happiness), whom the boys call LiLi. Vero justifies LiLi's role in their home by insisting that she is part of their family, and she goes to great lengths in order to ease her conscience. But differences persist; Vero grapples with her overextended role as a mother and struggles to keep her marriage passionate, while LiLi silently bears the burden of a secret she left behind at home.Between offers readers an intriguing, searing portrait of two women from two different cultures. At the same time, it satirizes contemporary love, marriage, and parenthood by exposing the sense of entitlement and superiority at the heart of upper-middle-class North American existence through a ubiquitous presence in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou comically and tragically tackles the issue of international nannies by providing a window on motherhood where it is tangled up with class, career, labour, and desire
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mordecai Richler - 1959
Duddy -- the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal -- is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody," Duddy learns about living -- and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy. As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz becomes a lesson for us all...in laughter and in life.
The Friends of Meager Fortune
David Adams Richards - 2006
But as young men, the boys couldn’t be more different — where seventeen-year-old Will is headstrong and rugged, able to hold his own in the woods or in a fight, Owen, three years his junior, is literary and sensitive. What worries their mother Mary, however, is the prophecy told to her by a local woman upon Will’s birth: “that her first-born would be a powerful man and have much respect — but his brother would be even greater, yet destroy the legacy by rashness, and the Jameson dynasty [would] not go beyond that second boy.” She tries to laugh it off, but the prophecy becomes a part of local legend and hangs over the heads of the boys like a dark cloud.When their father dies in a freak accident and the management of the Jameson tracts and company falters, Will, as the true inheritor of his father’s “shrewd mind and fists to match,” quits school to take over. He’s a strong leader of men, but perhaps too strong at times, and dies while clearing a log jam during a run. Reggie Glidden, Will’s best friend and the Push of the Jameson team, takes Owen under his wing, searching for any small sign that the younger boy has his brother’s qualities. But Owen knows his limitations and, after his brother’s death and then rejection by the girl of his dreams, Lula Brower, he joins the army and heads off to war hoping to get himself killed. Instead, he returns a decorated war hero.Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia — the wife of Reggie Glidden — and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town’s gossip and hypocrisy despite the innocence of their relationship. But for the community, it’s as if taking Owen Jameson — and therefore the whole Jameson family — down a peg or two will give them control over their changing world. Inexorably, Owen and Camellia are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance, and a sensational trial.At the same time, realizing his destiny, Owen takes over the family business and begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in fierce ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him.With The Friends of Meager Fortune, award-winning author David Adams Richards continues his exploration of New Brunswick’s Miramichi Valley, both the hard lives and experiences that emerge from that particular soil and the universal human matters that concern us all: the work of the hands and the heart; the nature of true greatness and true weakness; the relentlessness of fate and the good and evil that men and women do. It is a devastating portrait of a society, but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world — one that cements David Adams Richards’ place as the finest novelist at work in Canada today.
Inside
Alix Ohlin - 2012
Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.
The Secret Child
Kerry Fisher - 2017
And Danny, Susie’s husband, adores her, but has always sensed something wrong at the heart of their marriage. When tragedy strikes the family, and a chance discovery threatens to bring the truth to light, the sisters’ relationship is put to the test as they are faced with an impossible choice…