Join us for a reading and signing event with legendary local author!

“There are things that it is impossible to learn when you are young, no matter how much you read and study.” The season of fury and wonder, in Sharon Butala’s world, is the old age of women. These stories present the lives of old women – women of experience, who’ve seen much of life, who’ve tasted of its sweetness and its bitter possibilities, and have developed opinions and come to conclusions about what it all amounts to. These are stories of today’s old women, who understand that they have been created by their pasts. But there’s another layer to this standard-setting example of “cronelit.” Not content to rest on her considerable literary laurels, Sharon Butala continues to push the boundaries of her art. The stories in Season of Fury and Wonder are all reactions to other, classic, works of literature that she has encountered and admired. These stories are, in their various ways, inspired by and tributes to works by the likes of Raymond Carver, WillaCather, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Conner, John Cheever, Alan Sillitoe, Ernest Hemmingway, Tim O’Brien, Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Checkov.

The Owl's Nest Hootdunnit Mystery Book Club meets on the third Wednesday of each month at 7:00pm. There is no membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome. 

December's pick is Mistletoe Murder by P.D. James

 P. D. James's understanding of human nature illuminates each of these four stories, making them ideal reading for the darkest days of the year. Each treats the reader to her masterfully atmospheric storytelling, a mystery to be solved, and enjoyable puzzles to keep the reader guessing. With wry humour, she pays tribute to her English crime-writing forebears, delighting in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at enforced family gatherings and in old country houses--from the title story about a strained family reunion on Christmas Eve, to another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and two cases that introduce James's poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh as a young detective sergeant.

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book: Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlen

About the book:

One Monday morning in April, a middle-aged writer walks into her living room to water the plants and finds a woman standing beside her potted fig tree. Dressed in a navy blue trench coat and white Nikes, the woman introduces herself as "Mary. Mother of God.... You know. Mary." Instead of a golden robe or a crown, she arrives bearing a practical wheeled suitcase. Weary after two thousand years of adoration and petition, Mary is looking for a little R & R. She's asked in for lunch, and decides to stay a week. As the story of their visit unfolds, so does the story of Mary-one of the most complex and powerful female figures of our time-and her changing image in culture, art, history, as well as the thousands of recorded sightings that have placed her everywhere from a privet hedge to the dented bumper of a Camaro.

As this Everywoman and Mary become friends, their conversations, both profound and intimate, touch upon Mary's significance and enduring relevance. Told with humor and grace, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is an absorbing tour through Mary's history and a thoughtful meditation on spirituality, our need for faith, and our desire to believe in something larger than ourselves.

Join us for the Calgary launch of Alberta author's new YA novel!

Sixteen-year-old Claire is walking across Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver when a good-looking young man approaches. He's laughing, talking on his cellphone. Then, when they get close, he reaches out, hands her his phone, says, "I'm sorry,? " then climbs over the railing and jumps.

This is the shockingly vivid first scene of Leanne Baugh's young adult novel, Last Words, a moment that profoundly changes Claire's life as she searches for an explanation to this mysterious suicide. In the end, Claire's investigation becomes an assertion of life, rather than a mourning over death.

Pivotal to the story is Claire meeting with Kiki, a young cancer patient whose determined passion for life inspires her to embrace the everyday. Then there's Claire's sister Belle, who has Down's syndrome and is a steady reminder that life is messy but full of possibilities.

This profound novel is rich in diverse characters that illustrate what it is to live fully in this world.

Join us for a local author book launch party!

A timely and heartfelt collection of essays inspired by the #MeToo movement, edited by acclaimed young adult and middle-grade author Janet Gurtler. Featuring Beth Revis, Mackenzi Lee, Ellen Hopkins, Saundra Mitchell, Jennifer Brown, Cheryl Rainfield and many more.

When #MeToo went viral, Janet Gurtler was among the millions of people who began to reflect on her past experiences. Things she had reluctantly accepted—male classmates groping her at recess, harassment at work—came back to her in startling clarity. She needed teens to know what she had not: that no young person should be subject to sexual assault, or made to feel unsafe, less than or degraded.

You Too? was born out of that need. By turns thoughtful and explosive, these personal stories encompass a wide range of experiences and will resonate with every reader who has wondered, “Why is this happening to me?” or secretly felt that their own mistreatment or abuse is somehow their fault—it’s not. Candid and empowering, You Too? is written for teens, but also an essential resource for the adults in their lives—an urgent, compassionate call to listen and create change.

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book is: The Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates


About this book:

Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.

Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel  is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book: The Brotherhood of Book Hunters by Raphael Jerusalmy

About this book: 


The Da Vinci Code meets Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve in this erudite adventure story set at the dawn of the printed book about the outlaw poet François Villon and the power of words to change the world.

François Villon, the world's first poet of modernity, was born in Paris in 1431. He was arrested and condemned to death by hanging in 1462 and exonerated in 1463. Shortly after his release from prison, as far as history is concerned, he disappeared forever. 

In Raphaël Jerusalmy's thrilling novel, to ensure his release, Villon has accepted a shady deal offered by the Bishop of Paris at the behest of Louis XI. All Villon has to do to earn his freedom is to convince a printer and bookseller to move from Mayence to Paris, telling him that by doing so he'll be better able to circulate progressive ideas that aren't approved of in Rome. Not surprisingly, Villon's task becomes more complicated that it first seemed. With this riveting tale of plotsand counterplots involving secret organizations in Jerusalem, intrigue in France, and brigands in Italy, Raphaël Jerusalmy leaves readers with their hearts racing and their imaginations stirred.The Brotherhood of Book Hunters is an irresistible read for lovers of books, adventure, and fine writing.

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book: The Boat People by Sharon Bala

About this book:

When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father is overcome with relief: he and his six-year-old son can finally put Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war behind them and begin new lives. Instead, the group is thrown into prison, with government officials and news headlines speculating that hidden among the “boat people” are members of a terrorist militia. As suspicion swirls and interrogation mounts, Mahindan fears the desperate actions he took to survive and escape Sri Lanka now jeopardize his and his son’s chances for asylum. 
            Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya, who reluctantly represents the migrants; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan’s fate, The Boat People is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Inspired by real events, with vivid scenes that move between the eerie beauty of northern Sri Lanka and combative refugee hearings in Vancouver, where life and death decisions are made, Sharon Bala’s stunning debut is an unforgettable and necessary story for our times

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book: Bridge of Clay by Marcus Zusak

About this book:

The breathtaking story of five brothers who bring each other up in a world run by their own rules. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance.

At the center of the Dunbar family is Clay, a boy who will build a bridge—for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins, for a miracle.

The question is, how far is Clay willing to go? And how much can he overcome?
 
Written in powerfully inventive language and bursting with heart, BRIDGE OF CLAY is signature Zusak.

Our Wonderful Literary Society, or O.W.L.S, is our store book club for literary readers. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm. There is not membership fee and drop-ins are always welcome.

This month's book is Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson


About this book:


 Meet Jared Martin: sixteen-year-old pot cookie dealer, smoker, drinker and son with the scariest mom ever. But Jared's the pot dealer with a heart of gold--really. Compassionate, caring, and nurturing by nature, Jared's determined to help hold his family together--whether that means supporting his dad's new family with the proceeds from his baking or caring for his elderly neighbours. But when it comes to being cared and loved, Jared knows he can't rely on his family. His only source of love and support was his flatulent pit bull Baby, but she's dead. And then there's the talking ravens and the black outs and his grandmother's perpetual suspicion that he is not human, but the son of a trickster.