2025/2026

Meet Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey’s uncle’s old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between.  Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy.  One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine.  But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard did not expect the house to be empty.  Nor did he expect to find a body in the cellar.  Buried under the flagstones are the remains of Cora Crippen, former music-hall singer and wife of Dr. Hawley Crippen.  No one would have thought the quiet, unassuming Dr. Crippen capable of murder, yet the doctor and his mistress have disappeared from London, and now a full-scale hunt for them has begun.

Across the Channel in Antwerp, the S.S. Montrose has just set off on its two-week voyage to North America.  Slipping in among the first-class passengers is a Mr. John Robinson, accompanied by his teenage son, Edmund.  The pair may be hoping for a quiet, private voyage, but in the close confines of a luxury ocean liner, anonymity is rare.  And with others aboard looking for romance, or violence, or escape from their past in Europe, it will take more than just luck for the Robinsons to survive the voyage unnoticed.

An accomplished, intricately plotted novel, Crippen brilliantly reimagines the amazing escape attempt of one of history's most notorious killers and marks the outstanding American debut of one of Ireland's best young novelists.

For the right man, all doors are open...  Mike Mackenzie is a self-made man with too much time on his hands and a bit of the devil in his soul.  He is looking for something to liven up the days and perhaps give new meaning to his existence.  A chance encounter at an art auction offers him the opportunity to do just that as he settles on a plot to commit a 'perfect crime'.  He intends to rip-off one of the most high-profile targets in the capital - the National Gallery of Scotland.  So, together with two close friends from the art world, he devises a plan to a lift some of the most valuable artwork around.  But of course, the real trick is to rob the place for all its worth whilst persuading the world that no crime was ever committed.  But soon after he enters the dark waters of the criminal underworld he realizes that it's very easy to drown...

As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer.  She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, "The Goshawk," which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.

When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk.  She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge.  Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

Destined to be a classic of nature writing, "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming.  At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for "The Once and Future King."  It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.

Barcelona, 1957.  It is Christmas, and Daniel Sempere and his wife Bea have much to celebrate.  They have a beautiful new baby son named Julian, and their close friend Fermín Romero de Torres is about to be wed.  But their joy is eclipsed when a mysterious stranger visits the Sempere bookshop and threatens to divulge a terrible secret that has been buried for two decades in the city's dark past.  His appearance plunges Fermín and Daniel into a dangerous adventure that will take them back to the 1940's and the dark early days of Franco's dictatorship.  The terrifying events of that time launch them on a journey fraught with jealousy, suspicion, vengeance, and lies, a search for the truth that will put into peril everything they love and ultimately transform their lives.

Full of intrigue and emotion, The Prisoner of Heaven is a majestic novel in which the threads of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game converge under the spell of literature and bring us toward the enigma of the mystery hidden at the heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a collection of lost treasures known only to its few initiates and the very core of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's enchanting fictional world.

When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again.  Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua.  She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Brunei.  Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning.  But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth.

Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness.  With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.

For readers of All the Light We Cannot See and In Memoriam, a moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies while protecting the ones he loves.

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community.  An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power.  The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm.  There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.

In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes.  They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country.  Ironically, as the Allies' vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.

Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history.

This month's book pick consists of volumes 1 & 2 from A Richard Rohmer Omnibus, a collection of three of Richard Rohmer's bestselling speculative novels (Ultimatum | Exxoneration | Periscope Red), offering a chilling vision of resource-rich Canada under threat of invasion.

In Ultimatum (originally published in 1973), an energy crisis which the United States has been unable to prevent has left that country desperate for power from the Arctic.  Frustrated by the lack of Canadian responsiveness to U.S. overtures regarding a continental energy policy, the President delivers an ultimatum — oil or war.   We open the sequel, Exxoneration, with the U.S. taking steps toward its intention to annex Canada.

The third volume, titled Periscope Red (and not part of this month's selection), portrays the growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States that ultimately lead to Soviet submarines attacking the world's oil tankers.

Richard Rohmer writes fast-paced, incisive novels with chilling visions of a world of military conflict, legal and political entanglements, and Canada’s role in domestic and international spheres.  The issues inside are just as important to Canada today as they were when the books were written.  In all of these works, Rohmer demonstrates his insider’s knowledge of the energy industry and the military, and his master storyteller’s ability to bring it alive.

The stunning new Victorian thriller from the author of OCTOBER SKIES...

1912.  Locked in an eerily quiet dining room on the Titanic, a mysterious man tells a young girl his life story as the ship begins to sink. It all starts in Whitechapel, London in 1888...
In the small hours of the night in a darkened Whitechapel alley, young Mary Kelly stumbles upon a man who has been seriously injured and is almost unconscious in the gutter.  Mary - down on her luck and desperate to survive - steals his bag and runs off into the night.
Two days later, an American gentleman wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of who he is or how he got there.  He has suffered a serious head injury, and with no one to help him remember who he is he starts to wonder how he will ever find his way home.
One terrible truth links these two lost souls in the dark world of Victorian London - a truth that could ruin the name of the most influential man in the land...
Back in 1912, as the Titanic begins its final shuddering descent to the bottom of the frozen, black Atlantic, the truth behind a series of murders that have hung like a dark fog over London for more than two decades is about to be revealed... the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant Chinese family.  The siblings grapple with their individual identities in a changing world, wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty.  Sister Jook-Liang dreams of becoming Shirley Temple and escaping the rigid, old ways of China.  Adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum, struggling with his sexuality and the trauma of his childhood in China, finds his way through boxing.  Third Brother Sekky, who never feels comfortable with the multitude of Chinese dialects swirling around him, becomes obsessed with war games, and learns a devastating lesson about what war really means when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man.

Mingling with life in Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family.  Side by side, her three grandchildren survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor.  Like the jade peony of the title, Choy's storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely.

The Jade Peony was selected by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the "100 Most Important Books in Canadian History" in 2005.  It was also an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year in 1998, and was winner of the 1995 Trillium Award (shared with Margaret Atwood).

Born on the tundra in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and evacuated to a southern sanitarium.  When she returns home six years later, she finds a radically different world, where the traditionally rootless tribes have uneasily congregated in small communities.  And Victoria has become a stranger to her family and her culture.

In Rankin Inlet, a small town bordering the Arctic Ocean, the lives of the Inuit are gradually changing.  The caribou and seals are no longer plentiful, and Western commerce has come to the community through a proposed diamond mine.  Victoria Robertson wakes to a violent storm, her three children stirring in the dark.  Her father, Emo, a legendary hunter who has come in off the land to work in a mine, checks to see if the family is all right.  So does her Inuit lover, as Victoria’s British husband is away on business.

Thus the reader enters into the modern contradictions of the Arctic—walrus meat and convenience food, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV, dog teams and diamond mines—and into the heart of Victoria's internal exile.

The start of summer brings yet another season of great reads to a close!  Please take some time to consider your book nominations for the next reading season and join us at our August 4th meeting to share them  ...and to discuss plans for our super Block Party, too! 😃