Governor General's Literary Awards 2018

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

William Holt

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

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You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

Review content may be used by Loan Stars, the publisher of the title, BookNet Canada or selected third-parties at the program's discretion loanstsrs

You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

This is a really great book that really opens your eyes to the use of hokey-pokey snakeoil based teething pain treatments that aren't Tylenol or Motrin based. Or then something else entirely that has nothing to do

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Governor General's Literary Awards 2018

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1.
Series: The Red Word Paperback Sarah Henstra 9781770414242 $19.95 FICTION Mar 06, 2018

Winner of the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult novel by a powerful new voice A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry — particularly at Gamma Beta Chi. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of f... + Read More
2.
Series: Beirut Hellfire Society Hardcover Rawi Hage 9780735273597 $29.95 FICTION Aug 28, 2018

FINALIST FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONAn explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro’s Game and Cockroach.It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country’s Civil War. On a torn-up street overlooking a cemetery in the city’s Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approa... + Read More
3.
Series: Jonny Appleseed Paperback Joshua Whitehead 9781551527253 $17.95 FICTION Apr 01, 2018

A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reserve. "You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordai... + Read More
4.
Series: Women Talking A Novel Hardcover Miriam Toews 9780735273962 $29.95 FICTION Aug 21, 2018

A FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD: A transformative and necessary work—as completely unexpected as it is inspired—by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. Eight women—ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers; yet to August, each one extraordinary—will climb the ladder into ... + Read More
5.
Series: Zolitude Paperback Paige Cooper 9781771962179 $19.95 FICTION Mar 01, 2018

WINNER OF THE 2018 QUEBEC WRITERS' FEDERATION CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY FIRST BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR THE 2018 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 A QUILL & QUIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR Fantastical, magnetic, and harsh—these are the women in Paige Cooper’s debut short story collection Zolitude. They are women who built time machines when they were nine, who buy plane tickets for lovers who won’t arrive. They a... + Read More
6.
Series: Mamaskatch A Cree Coming of Age Hardcover Darrel J. McLeod 9781771622004 $29.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Sep 15, 2018

Growing up in the tiny village of Smith, Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod was surrounded by his Cree family’s history. In shifting and unpredictable stories, his mother, Bertha, shared narratives of their culture, their family and the cruelty that she and her sisters endured in residential school. McLeod was comforted by her presence and that of his many siblings and cousins, the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea, and his deep love of the landscape. Bertha taught him to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that would... + Read More
7.
Series: Dead Reckoning How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father Paperback Carys Cragg 9781551526973 $19.95 TRUE CRIME Sep 12, 2017

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes) When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father, a respected doctor, was brutally murdered in his own home by an intruder. Twenty years later, and despite the reservations of her family and friends, she decides to contact his murderer in prison, and the two correspond for a period of two years. She learns of his horrific childhood, and the reasons he lied about the murder; in turn, he learns about the ... + Read More
8.
Series: Heart Berries A Memoir Hardcover Terese Marie Mailhot 9780385691147 $25.00 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Mar 13, 2018

Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot’s debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation.Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar II, Terese Mailhot is given a notebook and begins ... + Read More
9.
Series: Homes A Refugee Story Paperback Abu Bakr al Rabeeah 9781988298283 $19.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY May 01, 2018

Finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Politcal Writing. Audience choice winner of Canada ReadsIn 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria - just before the Syrian civil war broke out. Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was ten years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war... + Read More
10.
Series: The Wife's Tale A Personal History Hardcover Aida Edemariam 9780307361714 $34.00 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Feb 27, 2018

A FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD: The true story of one indomitable woman caught in the tumult of an extraordinary century in Ethiopia, The Wife’s Tale has the sweep and lyrical power that captivated readers of Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone.A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over her lifetime her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and o... + Read More
11.
Series: Wayside Sang Paperback Cecily Nicholson 9781772011821 $16.95 POETRY Oct 16, 2017

Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyon... + Read More
12.
Series: Because A Lyric Memoir Hardcover Joshua Mensch 9780393635225 $29.95 POETRY May 15, 2018

A gripping verse memoir that offers a compassionate and wrenching account of the author’s experience of childhood sexual abuse.Joshua Mensch’s devastating lyric memoir, Because, explores with extraordinary literary power and sophistication the toxic power of adults who prey on the children in their care. Its story begins when Mensch is ten years old and first meets Don, the charming director of a youth wilderness camp and a lifelong friend of his parents. What follows is a harrowing account of sexual and psychological abuse, told from the evolv... + Read More
13.
Series: Night Became Years Paperback Jason Stefanik 9781552453636 $19.95 POETRY Apr 05, 2018

Poems about alchemy, love, Protestant witch judges, Indigenous identity, the cultural abutments of the inner city, football taunts, border ballads, and halfbreed wailing. Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flâneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenthcentury English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian innercity worldview, the poems in Night Becomes Years unfold as se... + Read More
14.
Series: The Blue Clerk Ars Poetica in 59 Versos Hardcover Dionne Brand 9780771070815 $32.95 POETRY Sep 18, 2018

Dionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself.On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet’s accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet’s pages. In their dialogues—which take ... + Read More
15.
Series: This Wound is a World Paperback Billy-Ray Belcourt 9781927823644 $19.95 POETRY Sep 26, 2017

This Wound is a World slip-slides between poetry and essay to get at the shaky tempos of Indigenous life in a world bent on destroying it. It zeroes in on the world-shaking force of sex and love – when ‘we disappear into each other’ – to figure out how we are able to shoulder sadness like ours and still get through the day. Queer in form and content, This Wound is a World slows down the turbulent colonial present to scavenge for something of an exit route.
16.
Series: Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom Paperback Jordan Tannahill 9781770919174 $18.95 DRAMA Sep 17, 2018

Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom presents wildly apocryphal retellings of two events—one historic, one mythic—that reconsider the official record through decidedly queer and feminist lenses. Painter Sandro Botticelli is an irrepressible libertine, renowned for his weekend-long orgies as much as he is for his great masterpieces of the early Renaissance. But things get complicated when Lorenzo de’ Medici commissions Botticelli to paint a portrait of his wife, Clarice. What emerges is the famed The Birth of Venus and a love triangle involv... + Read More
17.
Series: Gertrude and Alice Paperback Evalyn Parry 9781770918801 $18.95 DRAMA Mar 12, 2018

Visiting the audience in the present day, Gertrude and Alice come to find out how history has treated them. The couple recounts stories of their forty-year relationship; of meetings with iconic artists and writers; and of Alice’s overwhelming, consuming devotion to Gertrude’s genius. Before they leave, they want to find out what has become of their artistic and cultural influence, and how their lives and work are—or are not—remembered.
18.
Series: Paradise Lost Paperback Erin Shields 9781770919334 $17.95 DRAMA Sep 03, 2018

“The biggest mistake any of us could make would be to underestimate Satan.” The seventeenth century and present day are seamlessly intertwined as Satan vents to an audience about her frustration at being cast out of Heaven and her thoughts on oppression. When she finds out that God has created delicate new creatures called “humans,” she crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty. Erin Shields turns Heaven and Hell upside down in this witty, modern, feminist retelling of John Milton’s epic poem about the first battle between good and... + Read More
19.
Series: The Men in White Paperback Anosh Irani 9781487004736 $19.95 DRAMA Sep 25, 2018

FINALIST, GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR DRAMA In the latest play from Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Anosh Irani, we meet eighteen-year-old Hasan Siddiqui, who lives in a bustling Muslim quarter of Bombay. He escapes the drudgery of his work at a chicken slaughterhouse by fostering two fervent dreams — to become a star in cricket, a sport at which he happens to excel, and to win the affections of Haseena, a fiercely intelligent young woman two years his junior. When it comes to her, however, he is not so proficient, and Hasa... + Read More
20.
Series: This Is How We Got Here Paperback Keith Barker 9781770918221 $17.95 DRAMA Oct 30, 2017

It’s been a year since Paul and Lucille’s son Craig committed suicide, and their once-solid family bonds are starting to break down. While the now-separated couple tries to honour their son, Lucille’s sister Liset and her husband Jim refuse to discuss their nephew. The ties that keep the four together as sisters, best friends, and spouses are strained by grief and guilt… until a visit from a fox changes everything.
21.
Series: Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster Hardcover Jonathan Auxier 9780735264359 $21.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 8 - 12 Sep 25, 2018

A brand-new novel by one of today’s most powerful storytellers, Sweep is a heart-rending adventure about the everlasting gifts of friendship and hope.For nearly a century, Victorian London relied on “climbing boys”—orphans owned by chimney sweeps—to clean flues and protect homes from fire. The work was hard, thankless and brutally dangerous. Eleven-year-old Nan Sparrow is quite possibly the best climber who ever lived—and a girl. With her wits and will, she’s managed to beat the deadly odds time and time again.But when Nan gets stuck in a deadl... + Read More
22.
Series: Ebb and Flow Hardcover Heather Smith 9781771388382 $17.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 9 - 12 Apr 03, 2018

One summer, after a long plane ride and a rotten bad year I went to Grandma Jo's. It was my mother's idea. Jett, what you need is a change of scenery. I think she needed a change of scenery, too. One without me. Because that rotten bad year? That was my fault. Thus begins the poignant story, told in free verse, of eleven-year-old Jett. Last year, Jett and his mother had moved to a new town for a fresh start after his father went to jail. But Jett soon learned that fresh starts aren't all they're cracked up to be. When he befriended a boy with ... + Read More
23.
Series: Learning to Breathe Hardcover Janice Lynn Mather 9781534406018 $23.99 YOUNG ADULT FICTION Age (years) from 14 - 99 Jun 26, 2018

A 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection Amelia Bloomer List’s 2019 Top Ten Recommended Feminist Books for Young Readers A Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist A Junior Library Guild Selection A Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize Semifinalist A BC Book Prize Finalist “A love letter to girls—bittersweet and full of hope.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of National Book Award Finalist American Street “This is a stellar debut.” —Brandy Colbert, award-winning author of Little & Lion and Pointe “A vibrant, essential story of healing, ... + Read More
24.
Series: The Journey of Little Charlie Hardcover Christopher Paul Curtis 9781443142632 $19.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 9 - 12 Jan 30, 2018

Newbery Medalist Christopher Paul Curtis brings his trademark humor and heart to the story of a boy struggling to do right in the face of history's cruelest evils.Twelve-year-old Charlie is down on his luck: His dad just died, the share crops are dry, and Cap'n Buck - the most fearsome man in Possum Moan, South Carolina - has come to collect a debt. Fearing for his life, Charlie strikes a deal with Cap'n Buck and agrees to track down some thieves. It's not too bad of a bargain for Charlie... until he comes face-to-face with the fugitives and di... + Read More
25.
Series: Winnie's Great War Hardcover Lindsay Mattick 9781443456982 $17.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 8 - 12 Sep 18, 2018

From the creative team behind the bestselling Finding Winnie, winner of the Caldecott Medal, comes an extraordinary wartime adventure seen through the eyes of the world’s most beloved bearHere is a heartwarming reimagining of the real journey undertaken by the extraordinary bear who inspired Winnie-the-Pooh. Follow Winnie’s war adventure—from her early days with her mother in the Canadian forest, to her remarkable travels with the Veterinary Corps across the country and overseas, and all the way to the London Zoo, where she met Christopher Robi... + Read More
26.
Series: They Say Blue Hardcover Jillian Tamaki 9781773060200 $19.95 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 4 - 7 Mar 01, 2018

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, Young People’s Literature – Illustrated Books Winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Picture Book AwardNew York Times Notable Children’s Books of 2018NPR’s 2018 Great Reads CBC Books Best Canadian YA and Children’s Literature of 2018Caldecott and Printz Honor-winning illustrator Jillian Tamaki brings us a poetic exploration of colour and nature from a young child’s point of view. They Say Blue follows a young girl as she contemplates colours in the known and the unknown, in the immediate world and ... + Read More
27.
Series: Africville Hardcover Shauntay Grant 9781773060439 $18.95 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 4 - 7 Sep 01, 2018

Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, Young People’s Literature – Illustrated BooksWhen a young girl visits the site of Africville, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the stories she’s heard from her family come to mind. She imagines what the community was once like — the brightly painted houses nestled into the hillside, the field where boys played football, the pond where all the kids went rafting, the bountiful fishing, the huge bonfires. Coming out of her reverie, she visits the present-day park and the sundial where her great- grandmot... + Read More
28.
Series: At the Pond Hardcover Werner Zimmermann 9781443142878 $19.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 0 - 6 Aug 28, 2018

A stunning new picture book that serves as a spectacular meditation on the wonders of nature. From Werner Zimmermann, the bestselling and award-winning illlustrator of Pippin the Christmas Pig and A Porcupine in a Pine Tree, comes a new book featuring lush artwork and spare text about life in the wild. One fish, two fish, three fish, four . . . Spend a lazy summer day exploring a tiny, perfect slice of nature! Count goldfish as they swim about the tranquil pond. Watch as sunlight moves across the water. Spot a water lily blossoming, frogs and... + Read More
29.
Series: Go Show the World A Celebration of Indigenous Heroes Hardcover Wab Kinew 9780735262928 $21.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 5 - 9 Sep 11, 2018

“We are a people who matter.” Inspired by President Barack Obama’s Of Thee I Sing, Go Show the World is a tribute to historic and modern-day Indigenous heroes, featuring important figures such as Tecumseh, Sacagawea and former NASA astronaut John Herrington.Celebrating the stories of Indigenous people throughout time, Wab Kinew has created a powerful rap song, the lyrics of which are the basis for the text in this beautiful picture book, illustrated by the acclaimed Joe Morse. Including figures such as Crazy Horse, Net-no-kwa, former NASA astro... + Read More
30.
Series: Ocean Meets Sky Hardcover Terry Fan 9781481470377 $21.99 JUVENILE FICTION Age (years) from 4 - 8 May 15, 2018

“Young readers will be captivated.” —The Washington Post From the creators of the gorgeous bestseller The Night Gardener comes a stunning new picture book about a young boy who sets sail to find a place his grandfather told him about…the spot where the ocean meets the sky.It’s a good day for sailing. Finn lives by the sea and the sea lives by him. Every time he looks out his window it’s a constant reminder of the stories his grandfather told him about the place where the ocean meets the sky. Where whales and jellyfish soar and birds and castles... + Read More
31.
Series: Descent into Night Paperback Edem Awumey 9781988449166 $20.95 FICTION Nov 10, 2017

WINNER - Governor General's Literary Award for Translation Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. From Goncourt Prize finalist a beautiful and brilliant new novel. With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced to inform on his fr... + Read More
32.
Series: Explosions Michael Bay and the Pyrotechnics of the Imagination None Paperback Mathieu Poulin 9781771861519 $24.95 FICTION Sep 15, 2018

Mathieu Poulin brings us an action comedy of a novel, starring big-budget, explosion-happy movie director Michael Bay. What if Bay were, against all odds, a misunderstood genius right up there with the likes of Plato, Sartre, and Nietzsche? What if his films were more than just Baydiocre, high-grossing box-office successes held in low esteem by most movie critics? What if Bad Boys was a film about decolonization? What if The Rock was about failing to be recognized by one’s peers? If Armageddon was about a post-human future? And Pearl Harbor was... + Read More
33.
Series: Canadian Studies Jacob Isaac Segal A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu Paperback Pierre Anctil 9780776625713 $39.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Oct 03, 2017

Traduit par Vivian Felsen Finaliste des Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général (LivresGG) 2018, catégorie Traduction Né en Ukraine en 1896, J. I. Segal arrive à Montréal en 1910 et allait devenir un des premiers écrivains yiddish au Canada. Sa poésie lyrique et mystique, de même que les nombreux essais et articles qu’il a signés, incarnent à la fois une riche tradition littéraire et le modernisme de son temps. Pierre Anctil a écrit bien plus qu’une biographie. Pour la première fois, la production poétique de Segal est référencée, traduite ... + Read More
34.
Series: Little Beast Paperback Julie Demers 9781552453667 $17.95 FICTION Apr 05, 2018

A little girl with a beard must find herself a home in this contemporary fairy tale. It's 1944, and a little village in rural Quebec sits quietly beside an aging mountain and an angry river. The air tastes of kelp, and the wind keeps knocking over the cross. Beside that river an eleven-year-old girl lives with her parents. Her mother is very sad, and her father has vanished because he can't bear to look at his own daughter. You see, this little girl has suddenly sprouted a full beard. And so her mother has shut the curtains and locked the girl... + Read More
35.
Series: Songs For The Cold Of Heart None Paperback Eric Dupont 9781771861472 $29.95 FICTION Jul 01, 2018

Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)...Songs For The Cold Of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century—long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters—with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca.