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August 25, 2022
Read an Excerpt from Eyes of the Rigel, Booker-Nominated Roy Jacobsen's Haunting Story of a Woman's Postwar Journey
In Europe, the end of the Second World War officially meant peace, but that peace was for many a deeply uneasy one. Collaborators and resistance fighters lived side by side, with communists, refugees, ...
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April 21, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Gregory Koop's The Donkey Cutter, a Gritty, Moving Tale of Early 20th Century Canada
In Gregory Koop's The Donkey Cutter (Guernica Editions), Mareika Doerksen and her distant father are Mennonite in name only. Both mourning the loss of Mareika's mother, they bide their time until Mareika ...
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July 25, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Denise Da Costa's And the Walls Came Down, an Absorbing Portrait of East Toronto in the 90s
A diary can be a powerful portal. In Denise Da Costa's And The Walls Came Down (Dundurn Press), Delia Ellis returns to her childhood home in east Toronto, years after making her ways through the trials ...
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September 28, 2023
Excerpt: Laurence Beaudoin-Masse Skewers Influencer & Wellness Culture in Her Brilliant YA Sequel
Laurence Beaudoin-Masse's debut novel, Suck it In and Smile was published to wide acclaim in 2022. Exploring our social media-influenced obsession with perfection and appearance, the young adult novel ...
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January 12, 2024
Read an Excerpt from Secret Sex, an Anthology of R-Rated Fiction Written Anonymously by CanLit's Finest
24 stories, all of them firmly NSFW, make up the cheeky new collection Secret Sex, edited by Russell Smith (Dundurn Press/Rare Machines). Smith gathered 24 of the most acclaimed authors in the country, ...
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January 10, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Chelsea Wakelyn's Darkly Funny, Deeply Moving Story of Grief, What Remains of Elsie Jane
Grief comes with a lot of "supposed to" attached to it. You're not supposed to be a mess. You're not supposed to ever laugh. And you're definitely not supposed to solicit a space-time wizard on Craigslist ...
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June 29, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Jessica Outram's Historical Métis Adventure Story, Bernice and the Georgian Bay Gold
In many ways, Bernice, the heroine of Métis author and teacher Jessica Outram's Bernice and the Georgian Bay Gold (Second Story Press), is like any other eight-year-old: she lives with her family, ...
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August 08, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Cattle by Early Asian-Canadian Literary Superstar Winnifred Eaton, Newly Republished After 100 Years
Winnifred Eaton was not only one of the first North American writers of Asian descent to publish fiction in English, she was one of the most successful novelists of her day. Born in Montreal to an English ...
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February 06, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Mishka Lavigne's GG-Winning Play, Haven, in Which Two Strangers Connect in an Unexpected Way
In Mishka Lavigne's Haven (Playwrights Canada Press, translated by Neil Blackadder), which won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in its original French, the audience meets Elsie ...
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October 13, 2021
Read an Excerpt from Hannah Moscovitch, Maev Beaty & Ann-Marie Kerr's Painful & Beautiful Exploration of Motherhood for Modern Artists
We're continuing our week-long spotlight on excerpts at Open Book, bringing you delicious free samples of some of the most exciting Canadian books out this year. Today we've got something special: our ...