Staff Picks - New & Recommended Titles

Our picks among the new releases & award-winning books which are currently available at the Bookstore.

Fiction:

The Enchantress of Florence
by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend 'il Machia' - Niccolò Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.

Divisadero
by Michael Ondaajte

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje's most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

In November 2007, Divisadero earned Ondaajte his record-tying fifth Governor General's Literary Award.

Late Nights On Air
by Elizabeth Hay

Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay's most seductive and accomplished novel yet, and is already garnering interest abroad.

Winner of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Non-Fiction:

28: Stories of AIDS in Africa
by Stephanie Nolan

From one of our most widely read, award-winning journalists comes the powerful, unputdownable story of the very human cost of a global pandemic of staggering scope and scale. It is essential reading for our times.

In 28, Stephanie Nolen, the Globe and Mail's Africa Bureau Chief, puts a human face to the crisis created by HIV-AIDS in Africa. She has achieved, in this amazing book, something extraordinary: she writes with a power, understanding and simplicity that makes us listen, makes us understand and care.

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman

Picture a world from which we all suddenly disappeared. Tomorrow. Noted journalist and professor Alan Weisman does just this in a book that is a tour de force of investigative writing and unputdownable reading. The World Without Us examines what would happen in both the immediate and distant future to the land, the animals (guess what? cockroaches would not survive for long), the oceans, our cities, our art and all manner of things we take for granted. Would the seas again teem with fish? Would our concrete jungles crumble into natural ones? How long, if ever, would it take for our collective footprint to fade away?

Better: A Surgeon's Notes On Performance
by Atul Gawande

In his new book, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.

At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey narrated by arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around (Salon). Gawandes investigation into medical professionals and how they progress from merely good to great provides rare insight into the elements of success, illuminating every area of human endeavor.

Musicophilia: Tales Of Music And The Brain
by Oliver Sacks

In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us a power that sometimes we control and at other times don't. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when t he world was much richer.

This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
by George Johnson

With the attention to detail of a historian and the story-telling ability of a novelist, New York Times science writer George Johnson celebrates these groundbreaking experiments and re-creates a time when the world seemed filled with mysterious forces and scientists were in awe of light, electricity, and the human body. Here, we see Galileo staring down gravity, Newton breaking apart light, and Pavlov studying his now famous dogs. This is science in its most creative, hands-on form, when ingenuity of the mind is the most useful tool in the lab and the rewards of a well-considered experiment are on elegant display.

Childrens / Young Adult:

Slam
by Nick Hornby

Just when everything is coming together for Sam, his girlfriend Alicia drops a bombshell. Make that ex-girlfriend - because by the time she tells him she's pregnant, they've already called it quits. Sam does not want to be a teenage dad...

The New Yorker calls bestselling author Nick Hornby "the maestro of the male confessional." His bestselling adult novels include High Fidelity and About a Boy, both of which were made into highly successful movies. Slam is his first foray into fiction for young adults.

The Best of Wallace & Gromit
by Dan Abnett (Author), Jimmy Hansen (Illustrator)

Wallace & Gromit, stars of their very own Oscar-winning, blockbuster movie, return for more exciting comic-strip extravaganzas... and this time they've brought Shaun the S heep and the dastardly Feathers McGraw!

In the first of four incredible adventures, Gromit is kidnapped by Feathers, forcing Wallace to rob a bank! There’s more inventions madness in the next tale when Wallace's creations go haywire; our heroes get mixed up in the hunt for a UFO; and finally there's mind swap mayhem as Shaun and Gromit accidentally exchange brains! Oh Noes!
 

The Way Back Home
by Oliver Jeffers

For the little ones on your holiday shopping list...

A story about a little boy who finds an aeroplane in the closet & takes off for a grand adventure only to crash and become stranded on the moon... with a friendly Martian who met a similar fate... How will they ever get home?