CBC Canada Reads Books on NNELS

NNELS is currently offering seven titles from Canada Reads 2015 on CBC. (Four of the books — All my Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier, Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson, and This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein — are coming soon.)

Below is a full list of available titles:

Arrival City (Non-Fiction)

by Doug Saunders

Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World examines how neighbourhoods around the world, including one in Toronto, provide the breeding ground for success for migrants.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

Bone and Bread (Fiction)

by Saleema Nawaz

In Saleema Nawaz’s dazzling debut, two sisters are raised by their traditional Sikh uncle, who takes them in after the death of their parents. They come of age in a clash of cultures, values and traditions and face intense personal struggles (anorexia for one, a teenage pregnancy for the other). When one sister dies unexpectedly at the age of 32, the other is left to discover the truth about her family, her sister’s death and even herself.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

Celia’s Song (Fiction)

by Lee Maracle

Set on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Celia’s Songchronicles the experiences of a Nuu’Chahlnuth family over several generations, and vividly brings to life the destructive legacy of colonial times — and a community’s capacity for healing. Its richly imagined characters include a sea serpent and a shape-shifting mink who bears witness to the past.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

The Door is Open (Non-Fiction)

by Bart Campbell

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

For Today I am a Boy (Fiction)

by Kim Fu

For Today I am a Boy is about the only son of a Chinese family who knows from an early age that he is a girl in the body of a boy. Peter Huang struggles with reconciling his identity with the small town ideals that surround him as well as his immigrants parents’ ideas about who he should be and how he should behave.

Available in NNELS in e-text, PDF, and DAISY format.

The Inconvenient Indian (Non-Fiction)

by Thomas King

Neither a traditional nor all-encompassing history of First Nations people in North America, The Inconvenient Indian is a personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian.” King explores the relationship between Natives and non-Natives since the fifteenth century and examines the way that popular culture has shaped our notion of indigenous identity, while also reflecting on his own complicated relationship with activism.

Available in NNELS in DAISY format.

Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (Non-Fiction)

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Part coming-out memoir, part contemporary Middle Eastern history and part cultural analysis, Intolerable is Kamal Al-Solaylee’s chronicle of his painful family history. Al-Solaylee is well known to Canadians for his journalism and cultural criticism — he was the theatre critic at the Globe and Mail for many years. But he was quiet about his background until writing Intolerable. In the book, he describes growing up in the Middle East at a time of enormous political strife and religious intolerance, coming to terms with his identity as a gay man, and escaping to get an education and build a life for himself in England and then here in Canada.

Available in NNELS in e-text, PDF, and DAISY format.

Monkey Beach (Fiction)

by Eden Robinson

Eden Robinson’s first English-language novel is about a family facing a harrowing loss. It’s told from the point of view of Lisa, the hot-tempered eldest sibling of a Haisla family in the Native settlement of Kitamaat on the coast of British Columbia. As the family awaits word about her brother, who’s missing at sea, Lisa looks back on their shared childhood. The spirit world and the natural world are equally real to her — and they are both vividly rendered in this riveting story of grief and survival.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

Ru (Fiction)

by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman

In vignettes that shift back and forth between past and present, Ru tells the story of a young woman forced to leave her Saigon home during the Vietnam War. In spare, luminous prose, Kim Thuy traces the woman’s journey from childhood in an affluent Saigon neighbourhood to youth in a crowded Malaysian refugee camp and then to Quebec, where she struggles to fit in — all aspects of the author’s own life story.

Available in NNELS in DAISY format.

What We All Long For (Fiction)

by Dionne Brand

The lives of four twenty-somethings living on the margins of Toronto intersect in Dionne Brand’s captivating novel. Their parents were immigrants to Canada; now, as they figure out who they are and what they want, the characters must reconcile their family’s past with their own present in a dynamic, sometimes unforgiving and often challenging city. This is a richly rendered portrait of urban experience, luminously vivid in both its characterization and setting.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.

When Everything Feels like the Movies (Fiction)

by Raziel Reid

This is the coming-of-age story of a young teen who refuses to be anything other than his flamboyant, fashion-loving self. Jude likes wearing his mother’s high heels and imagining that the world around him is part of a film set, and he doesn’t have it easy in high school, with its cliques and homophobes. His extravagant fantasies and irrepressible nature make Jude one of the most memorable teen characters in recent CanLit.

Available in NNELS in e-text, PDF, and DAISY format.

(You) Set Me on Fire (Fiction)

by Mariko Tamaki

Set in the confusing post-high school world of freshman university, (You) Set Me on Fire is written from the first person perspective of 17-year-old Allison Lee. Her musings on sexuality and relationships are hilarious, heartbreaking and bitingly true.

Available in NNELS in e-text and DAISY format.


Here are summaries of the titles that NNELS is currently working on:

All my Puny Sorrows (Fiction)

by Miriam Toews

What would you do if your sister asked you to help her commit suicide? That’s the painful question around which All My Puny Sorrows is framed. Elfreida, a successful concert pianist, asks her younger sister Yolandi, to help her commit suicide. This is a novel about sisters, families, growing older and what it means to love and let go.

And the Birds Rained Down (Fiction)

by Jocelyne Saucier, translated by Rhonda Mullins

Tom and Charlie are living on their own in the woods, away from civilization. But when two women arrive one summer, all four are faced with challenging questions about growing up, growing old and finding purpose in life.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Non-Fiction)

by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein tackles another tough topic in her latest book: climate change. In This Changes Everything Klein explains why climate change isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s an economic one – and we need to fundamentally reshape our economic systems if we truly want to tackle this issue. However, it’s not all doom and gloom – Klein maps out a plan for how to make this transformative shift.