Canada Reads 2024

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.

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After wandering out to the river near their homes, five teens decide to build a fire and exchange horror stories. Chad begins by telling the group about an unfortunate fisher who encountered a cluster of small, malevolent creatures while navigating the river in his canoe. Attempting to defend himself, Carl lashed out with an oar... and his world changed forever. One by one, the teens try to outdo each other, and the evening evolves into an impromptu storytelling competition. On certain nights, if you walk along Loon River and peer under the bridge, you might spot a fire. You might hear a laugh. You might hear a scream. If you edge closer―and the conditions are just right―your view of the river will melt away, into the inky black beyond the firelight. Not to worry―the echoes of rushing water will help you find your way back. Or will they? Inspired by Cree folklore and modern Cree life, Bad Medicine will transport readers to terrifying new worlds that only exist at the edges of human imagination.

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Bringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto's gentrifying Chinatown--Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind. A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue beautifully combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable.

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Looking for answers, and her missing granddaughters, Gloria moves into the house where her daughter was murdered. A stranger in a Fort-Detroit neighborhood coping with the ongoing effects of racial and economic injustice, she finds herself surrounded by poverty, pollution, violence--as well as the resilience of the residents, in whose stubborn generosity and carefully tended gardens she finds hope. When a strange intuition sends her into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city's orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can't imagine the strength she will find. Set in an alternate history in which the French never surrendered the city of Detroit.

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Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that's hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering City. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters.

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A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.

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From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative nonfiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Using a variety of forms including letters, essays and poems, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home. Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home.

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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. Darrel 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. In spite of the traumas of Darrel's childhood, deep and mysterious forces handed down by his mother helped him survive and thrive: her love and strength stay with him to build the foundation of what would come to be a very fulfilling and adventurous life.

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Fern Brookbanks has wasted far too much of her adult life thinking about Will Baxter. She spent just twenty-four hours in her early twenties with the aggravatingly attractive, idealistic artist, a chance encounter that spiraled into a daylong adventure in Toronto. The timing was wrong, but their connection was undeniable: they made a pact to meet one year later. Fern showed up. Will didn't. At thirty-two, Fern's life doesn't look at all how she once imagined it would. Fern's back home, running her mother's Muskoka lakeside resort. The place is in disarray, her ex-boyfriend's the manager, and Fern doesn't know where to begin. To her surprise, Will arrives nine years too late, an offer to help on his lips.

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When five-year-old Monolith is taken from the Philippines to live with his mother in Canada, he immediately lashes out. Unable or unwilling to speak, he attacks her and destroys his new home. Everyone wants to know why - and everyone has a theory. But unlike the solid certainty his name suggests, the answer isn't so simple. Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio takes readers into the kaleidoscope of the Filipino diaspora, uncovering the displacement, estrangement, resilience, and healing that happen behind closed doors.

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These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.

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Vietnamese refugees Debbie and Phil Tran have made a good life for themselves in Toronto, but their landlord has just jacked up the rent of their family-run nail salon, Sunshine Nails, and it's way more than they can afford. When Take Ten, a glamorous chain offering a more luxurious salon experience, moves into the neighborhood, the Tran family is terrified of losing their business--and the community they've built around them. But daughter Jessica comes to their rescue. She's just moved back home after a messy breakup and an even messier firing. Together with her workaholic brother, Dustin, and recently immigrated cousin, Thuy, they devise some good old-fashioned sabotage. But as the line between right and wrong gets blurred, relationships are put to the test, and Debbie and Phil must choose: Do they keep their family intact or fight for their salon?

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The worst moment of Sam's life was captured on video and shared across the Internet for all to gawk at. This is something she has in common with Robot, who just wants to move past the mistakes he's made. When the two meet in a high school music class, they start to find their way to each other. Music might offer a way not only forward, but forward together, if Sam and Robot can overcome the echoes of the moments that made them infamous.

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"A queer, modern Arthurian tale set in contemporary Vancouver. An autistic college student who is the latest reincarnation of Sir Gawain is drawn deeper and deeper into the family secrets and round table feuds he's spent his life trying to avoid while a Valkyrie tries to figure out who is murdering knights before the body count climbs"-- Provided by publisher.

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Planning the perfect prom is one last "to do" on ultra-organized Charlotte Wu's high school bucket list. Then a decorating accident sends Charlotte crash-landing off a ladder, face-first into her obnoxious archnemesis J. T. Renner. Worse, she wakes up in an unfamiliar bed-- thirty years old, with her bearded fiancee, Renner, by her side. Somehow they have been drop-kicked into adulthood, trapped in the thirty-year-old bodies of their future selves. With each other as their only constant, Charlotte and Renner discover all that has changed in the time they have missed. Reaching the next milestone may not be as important as what happens in between.

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