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Recommendations based on Awayby Jane Urquhart
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No Great Mischief
by Alistair MacLeod
A saga tracing a family's journey through generations of displacement and displacement.
Alistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief , the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it. ... (Goodreads)
A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews
A teenage girl navigates life in a strict Mennonite community while dealing with family dysfunction and questioning her faith.
The novel is set in a small religious Mennonite town called East Village, generally considered to be a fictionalized version of Toews' hometown of Steinbach , Manitoba . The narrator is Nomi Nickel, ... (Wikipedia)
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
A World War II love story, exploring the depths of human emotion in the midst of tragedy.
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, ... (Goodreads)
Lullabies for Little Criminals
by Heather O'Neill
A young girl's struggles to survive and find a place in a broken world.
The novel revolves around the twelve-year-old protagonist named Baby and follows her for two years. Baby lives with her father Jules, who has a worsening heroin addiction. The two move frequently, to ... (Wikipedia)
The Orenda
by Joseph Boyden
An exploration of the spiritual bonds between a small Huron tribe and their European invaders.
In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl’s captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation’s ... (Goodreads)
Unless
by Carol Shields
A writer's life is upended when her daughter drops out of college and becomes a panhandler. A story of love, loss, and self-discovery.
Reta Winters, 44-year-old successful author of light summertime fiction, has always considered herself happy, even blessed. That is, until her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college ... (Goodreads)
Fall on Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
A multi-generational saga of secrets, tragedy, and resilience in a family of sisters.
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live. Working as a piano tuner, he meets and ... (Wikipedia)
Through Black Spruce
by Joseph Boyden
A journey of reconciliation, to uncover the truth and find peace.
A haunting novel about identity, love, and loss by the author of, Three Day Road, Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, ... (Goodreads)
All My Puny Sorrows
by Miriam Toews
A heart-wrenching story of two sisters as one battles depression and the other struggles to keep her alive.
The novel recounts the tumultuous relationship of the Von Riesen sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, the only children of an intellectual, free-spirited family from a conservative Mennonite community. ... (Wikipedia)
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
A woman's life story told through a series of vignettes, examining the joys and sorrows of life.
The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through ... (Wikipedia)
Indian Horse
by Richard Wagamese
A story of survival, resilience, and redemption as an Indigenous Canadian boy finds his own path in life.
In 1961, the Indian Horse family—an Ojibway family consisting of eight-year-old Saul, his grandmother Naomi, and his Christian parents John and Mary—live in the wilderness of Northern Ontario , ... (Wikipedia)
Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
Three interconnected stories of nature, romance, and family in the Appalachian Mountains.
Prodigal Summer tells the story of a small town in Appalachia during a single, humid summer, when three interweaving stories of love, loss and family unfold against the backdrop of the lush wildness ... (Wikipedia)
The Marrow Thieves
by Cherie Dimaline
A dystopian future where Indigenous people have the power to dream, and the government is trying to steal it.
In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's ... (Goodreads)
Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood
A woman reflects on her childhood and her complex relationships with her peers.
After being lured back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective show of her art, Elaine reminisces about her childhood. At the age of eight she becomes friends with Carol and Grace, and, ... (Wikipedia)
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
by Stephen King
A collection of dark stories, exploring the strange and mysterious world of the subconscious.
A solitary finger pokes out of a drain. Novelty teeth turn predatory. Flies settle and die on an old pair of sneakers in New York, and the Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac. Meanwhile the legend of ... (Goodreads)
Half Blood Blues
by Esi Edugyan
Tale of a jazz band's tumultuous journey through the shadows of Nazi Germany.
The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymus Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, is arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. A German citizen. And he is ... (Goodreads)
Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Two modern academics uncover a hidden romance between two Victorian poets.
Obscure scholar Roland Michell, researching in the London Library , discovers handwritten drafts of a letter by the eminent Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, which lead him to suspect that the ... (Wikipedia)
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
A tale of the consequences of a child's mistake, and how its effects ripple through generations.
Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family's country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis. Her older sister Cecilia has recently graduated from ... (Wikipedia)
Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje
A story of family, love, and loss, set in the 1970s California.
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California ... (Goodreads)
The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
A man's attempt to rebuild his life in a small Newfoundland town, discovering compassion and joy.
The story centers around Quoyle, a newspaper reporter from upstate New York , whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland . Shortly after his parents' joint suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive ... (Wikipedia)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
by Rachel Joyce
An elderly man's unexpected quest of faith, discovering the power of hope and love.
Harold Fry, 65, has cut the lawn outside his home at Kingsbridge on the south coast of Devon when he receives a letter. A colleague of twenty years ago, Queenie Hennessy, has cancer and is in a ... (Wikipedia)
Shoeless Joe
by W.P. Kinsella
A man's magical journey of redemption, as he learns to heal from the past.
Ray Kinsella lives and farms in Iowa where he grows corn with his wife Annie and their five-year-old daughter Karin. Kinsella is obsessed with the beauty and history of American baseball , ... (Wikipedia)
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
by Alexander McCall Smith
The sixth book in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, following the adventures of Mma Ramotswe and her friends in Botswana.
Mma Ramotswe and her new husband settle down to married life with their foster-children, but problems are piling up. The tenant of Mr JLB Matekoni's house is running an illegal drinking den. Then ... (Wikipedia)
Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
Two Cree snipers fight in WWI, one returns home addicted to morphine, the other lost to the war.
It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is ... (Goodreads)
Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
A poetic exploration of the trauma of displacement and the power of memory.
The novel is split into two sections: Book I and Book II. Jakob Beer is a 7-year-old child of a Jewish family living in Poland . His house is stormed by Nazis; he escapes the fate of his parents and ... (Wikipedia)
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
A gripping story of four unlikely lives intertwined in the tumult of India's caste system.
The book exposes the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency called by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi . Mistry was generally critical of Indira Gandhi in the book. ... (Wikipedia)
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
by Madeleine Thien
A family saga spanning generations of musicians in China, exploring the impact of political upheaval on their lives and art.
The novel begins with a girl named Marie living with her mother in Vancouver , Canada. The year is 1991, and the addition to their household of a Chinese refugee fleeing the post-Tiananmen Square ... (Wikipedia)
Nights of Rain and Stars
by Maeve Binchy
A group of strangers on holiday in a small Greek village, coming together through tragedy and joy.
In a small town in Greece , a group of people witness a boating accident and subsequently become tangled in each other's lives. Thomas is a California university professor escaping from a tense ... (Wikipedia)
The Cat's Table
by Michael Ondaatje
A young boy's journey of self-discovery, exploring the world and its people.
A spellbinding story - by turns poignant and electrifying - about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage. ... (Goodreads)
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
A mysterious journey through a hidden realm of London, filled with danger and unexpected allies.
Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew and his trials and tribulations in London. At the start of the story, he is a young businessman, recently moved from Scotland and with a normal life ahead. ... (Wikipedia)
