National Network for Equitable Library Service

With a dozen original songs percolating in his head, bestselling author Eric Siblin had two chance encounters in the same month: one with a real estate agent named Jo, a talented singer with pop star dreams; and the other with a college acquaintance named Morey, a fiery guitarist, record exec turned digital music producer, and manager of his teenage daughter’s burgeoning singing career. These two serendipitous events mark the start of a musical odyssey. In Studio Grace, Eric Siblin chronicles the twelve-month realization of a long-held dream: recording an album of original material.

Award-winning Globe and Mail journalist Sandra Martin captures the life and times of 50 extraordinary Canadians, whose achievements, follies, and dreams have shaped the country we call home. Martin’s witty essays on the cult and craft of obituary writing, from the ancient Greeks to a wired up 24/7 world, explode the myths and celebrate the art of our oldest biographical form. Great Canadian Lives tells the political, social, and cultural history of modern Canada from WW1 to the Charter, from Pierre Trudeau to Jack Layton — one fascinating life at a time.

When civil war broke out in his home country in 2011, Hassan Al Kontar was a young Syrian living and working in the UAE. He refused to return to Syria for compulsory military service and lived illegally before being deported to Malaysia in 2018. Unable to obtain a visa for any other country, he became trapped in the arrivals zone at Kuala Lumpur Airport. Exiled by war and trapped by geopolitics, Al Kontar used social media and humour to tell his story to the world, becoming an international celebrity and ultimately finding refuge in Canada.

As a troubled teen, Lauren Manning sought refuge online in the angry world of black metal music. When she met a recruiter who offered her the acceptance she craved, the doctrine of white supremacy supplanted the values of her middle-class upbringing, and Lauren traded suburbia for a life of violence and criminality on the streets of Toronto.

The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. A lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates explosively after the author begins a PhD at the University of Oxford, and while in hospital she is liberated through psychosis. Her journey from terror to self-acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship.

An intriguing look at the accomplishments and contradictions of Joseph William McKay, best known as the founder of Nanaimo, BC, and one of the most successful Métis men to rise through the ranks of the Hudson's Bay Company in the late nineteenth century. When examining the history of British Columbia, one would be hard-pressed to find an Indigenous person who so successfully navigated the echelons of colonial power as did Joseph William McKay (1829-1900). McKay was Métis, born in Quebec, and began his career in Oregon during the dispute over the international boundary in 1845-46.

For Susan Lundy, motherhood began when she moved into her boyfriend's Salt Spring Island home at the age of twenty-one. Her new living arrangement came with furniture, a pair of kids, and a biting gerbil named Quasimodo. Susan was a career-oriented budding journalist, eager to write her way to fame and fortune. Becoming a mom was not part of her plan - at least not yet. But after surveying her new domicile with quiet horror at first, she grew into her new role, discarding many of the lessons her mother had given her about keeping house and inventing her own rules as she went along.

'Hollywood Edenbrings the lost humanity of the record business vividly back to life ... [Selvin's] style is blunt, unpretentious and brisk; he knows how to move things along entertainingly ... Songs about surfboards and convertibles had turned quaint, but in this book, their coolness is restored.' - New York Times.

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, in 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be 'one of the most dangerous men in Canada'. Able to Leadtraces Kingsley's political journey, starting with his time as a soapbox speaker in San Francisco. As a leading member of the California left, he ran for the US House of Representatives.

Larry Audlaluk was born in Uugaqsiuvik, a traditional settlement west of Inujjuak in northern Quebec, or Nunavik. He was almost three years old when his family was chosen by the government to be one of seven Inuit families relocated from Nunavik to the High Arctic in the early 1950s. They were promised a land of plenty. They were given an inhospitable polar desert. Larry tells of loss, illness, and his family's struggle to survive, juxtaposed with excerpts from official reports that conveyed the relocatees' plight as a successful experiment.