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Canadian Fiction April 2024
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The Laundryman's Boy
by Edward Y. C. Lee
Fall 1913, St. Catharines, Ontario. Thirteen-year-old Hoi Wing Woo, the son of a scholar, is forced to give up his dreams of an education when he is sent to work in a Chinese laundry in Canada. Hoi Wing is immediately thrust into relentless, mind-numbing toil, washing clothes by hand for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Isolated and friendless, he falls into despair. When he meets Heather, an Irish scullery maid who shares his love of books, Hoi Wing's life immediately brightens. Together, they escape the drudgery of their work by reading novels in a secret hideout. As their friendship grows, they defy the restrictions of their servitude and embark on a plan to better their lives. But Hoi Wing's dreams will not go unchallenged. Jonathan Braddock, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur who heads the Asiatic Exclusion League, has decided to run for mayor. If Braddock is elected, Hoi Wing will be sent back to China. The Laundryman's Boy is a moving coming-of-age story that bravely examines notions of race, duty and friendship in early Canada.
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The Celestial Wife
by Leslie Howard
A young fundamentalist Mormon girl facing a forced marriage escapes her strict, polygamist community and comes of age in the tumultuous 1960s in this captivating novel inspired by shockingly true events. For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure comes an arresting coming-of-age novel about a fearless young girl’s fight for freedom at a time of great historic change.
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The other valley : a novel
by Scott Alexander Howard
Vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil, 16-year-old Odile, who lives in an isolated town neighbored by its own past and future, discovers her friend Edme is about to die, and sworn to secrecy to preserve the timeline, instead finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.
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Silver repetition : a novel
by Lily Wang
"A coming-of-age novel that delicately illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships"
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Prairie Edge
by Conor Kerr
Meet Isidore "Ezzy" Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey's uncle's old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences.
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A friend in the dark
by Samantha M. Bailey
With her world crumbling in the face of a divorce and her daughter's estrangement, Eden Miller reaches out on social media to a former college crush who knows far too much about her life. Original.
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