Canada Reads 2022: Longlist | Main Library

1) The spoon stealer

Author

Formats:

Description

"Born into a basket of clean sheetsruining a perfectly good load of laundryEmmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town...

2) Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Author

Di Cintio, Marcello

Series

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Shortlisted for the Bressani Literary Prize • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021

In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi.

"The taxi," writes Marcello Di Cintio, "is a border." Occupying the space between public and private, a cab

...

3) Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Author

Di Cintio, Marcello

Series

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Shortlisted for the Bressani Literary Prize • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021

In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi.

"The taxi," writes Marcello Di Cintio, "is a border." Occupying the space between public and private, a cab

...

4) Washington Black

Author

Series

Center Point large print

Formats:

Book, Book Club Kit, eAudiobook, eBook, Large Print

Description

Washington Black, an eleven-year-old slave, is chosen to be the manservant of Christopher Wilde who takes him on adventures around the globe.

5) What strange paradise

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Large Print

Description

Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers - all desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vanna: a teenage girl who lives inside her own sense of homelessness. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and how...

6) Book of wings: a novel

Author

Evanson, Tawhida Tanya

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

Traces a global journey that leads the narrator onto a path toward personal discovery and spiritual fulfillment.

7) Satellite love

Author

Ferguson, Genki

Description

In a city in Japan that progress has forgotten, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for guidance. An outcast at school, fending for herself and caring for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. Everything changes the night a satellite sees her as no one else has before.

8) Everyone knows your mother is a witch: a novel

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

A fictionalized account based on the famous mathematician and astrologer, Johannes Kepler, whose mother Katharina was accused of being a witch in the 16th century.

9) Five little Indians

Author

Formats:

Book, Book Club Kit, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

WINNER: Canada Reads 2022

WINNER: Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

WINNER: Amazon First Novel Award

WINNER: Kobo Emerging Author Prize

Finalist: Scotiabank Giller Prize

Finalist: Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Prize

Finalist: BC & Yukon Book Prize

Shortlist: Indigenous Voices Awards

National Bestseller; A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year; A CBC Best Book of the Year; An Apple

...

10) Scarborough

Author

Hernandez, Catherine

Formats:

Description

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto. Like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. This novel tells the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire.

11) All the quiet places

Author

Isaac, Brian Thomas

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Eddie is growing up with his mother and little brother on the Okanagan Indian Reserve. When his father returns after years away he brings chaos to their household, and it is only when he's with his grandmother that Eddie feels peace.

12) Dominoes at the crossroads

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

In this short story collection, characters navigate race, history, and coming of age through their confessions and dreams.

13) Velvet was the night

Author

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia

Description

From the author of Mexican Gothic comes a riveting noir about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome thug, and the mystery of the missing woman that brings them together. 1970s Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger. Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, seems to live...

14) Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing

Author

Thomas-Muller, Clayton

Description

*FINALIST FOR 2022 CANADA READS*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MANITOBA BOOK AWARDS’ MCNALLY ROBINSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A gritty and inspiring memoir from renowned Cree environmental activist Clayton Thomas-Muller, who escaped the world of drugs and gang life to take up the warrior’s...

15) Life in the city of dirty water: a memoir of healing

Author

Thomas-Müller, Clayton

Description

Cree climate change activist traces his journey, from a child dealing with the legacy of his family's experiences in he residential school system, an Indigenous youth in an urban city facing racism and violence, and a teenager in and out of juvie, to his current role in the environmental justice movement.

16) From my mother's back: a journey from Kenya to Canada

Author

Wane, Njoki Nathani

Description

"In this warm and honest memoir, celebrated academic Njoki Wane shares her journey from her parents' small coffee farm in Kenya, where she helped her mother in the fields as a child, to her current work as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Moving smoothly between time and place, Wane uses her past to illuminate her present. The childhood confusion caused by nuns at her boarding school dismissing...

17) From My Mother's Back: A Journey from Kenya to Canada

Author

Description

In From My Mother's Back: A Journey from Kenya to Canada, Njoki Wane introduces us to her mother, a woman of deep wisdom, and to all the richness of a life lived between two countries. A celebrated professor and award-winning teacher, she shares her journey from a Catholic girls' boarding school in rural Kenya to standing in front of a lectern at the University of Toronto. Along the way she reflects on the heritage that was taken from her as a child...

18) We two alone: a novella and stories

Author

Series

Description

A collection of stories that tell the Chinese immigrant experience in the last century, across five continents.

19) We Two Alone

Author

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Winner, 2021 Danuta Gleed Award

A masterful collection of stories that dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years, We Two Alone is Jack Wang's astonishing debut work of fiction.

Set on five continents and spanning nearly a century, We Two Alone traces the long arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life to play organized

...