Recommended Reading Summer 2023: Home

*Romantic Fiction*
For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family's restaurant, Percy and Sam had been inseparable. And when Percy returns to the lake, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until she can confront the decisions she made, they'll never know whether their love is bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past. Told over the course of six years in the past and one weekend in the present, Every Summer After is a gorgeously romantic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

*YA Fiction*
On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They're going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they're both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There's an app for that. It's called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure--to live a lifetime in a single day.

*Science Fiction*
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

*Short Stories Collection*
All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto's Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book's characters--including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner--crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home.

*Graphic Novel*
Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush-part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Winner of Canada Reads 2023 and a New York Times Notable book.

*Holocaust Testimonials*
An intimate co-creation of three graphic novelists and four Holocaust survivors, But I Live consists of three illustrated stories based on the experiences of each survivor during and after the Holocaust. David Schaffer and his family survived in Romania due to their refusal to obey Nazi collaborators. In the Netherlands, brothers Nico and Rolf Kamp were separated from their parents and hidden by the Dutch resistance in thirteen different places. Through the story of Emmie Arbel, a child survivor of the Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, we see the lifelong trauma inflicted by the Holocaust.

*Classic Fiction*
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.

*From the Curriculum*
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Lesson Before Dying is a deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

*Poetry*
Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. She now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. These 200-plus poems provide us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of Oliver's passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

*YA Biography*
Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is remembered for her autobiographical series of paintings, Life? or Theater?, which consists of 769 individual works painted between 1940 and 1942 while she was in hiding from the Nazis in the south of France, and which has been called a painted parallel to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl and an early graphic novel. In 1943, she entrusted her collection of paintings to a friend. In October of that year, she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. An illuminating portrait of an enigmatic and evanescent young artist.

*Non-Fiction*
From the two-time winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award comes the first full depiction of the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution and how they laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. A masterpiece of research and writing.