Today I attended an event that is a festival favourite for many.  This was my first attending The Sunday Brunch but I am so glad I did.  There wasn’t much vegan food, except for a bit of bread, tasty, I might add.  There were also mimosas, mmm.  However, I didn’t go there for the food, I went for the authors!

In Seven Good Reasons Not To Be Good, John Gould treats mortality, morality, and modernity with equal parts empathy and wit in the manner of Jonathan Letham and Zadie Smith. His prose dazzles even as it reveals this novel’s complex heart: the imperfect art of letting go.

Cold-shouldered by his compatriots, Jacob earns the trust of a local interpreter and, more dangerously, becomes intrigued by a rare woman – a midwife permitted to study on Dejima under the company physician. He cannot foresee how disastrously each will be betrayed by someone they trust, nor how intertwined and far-reaching the consequences.

Duplicity and integrity, love and lust, guilt and faith, cold murder and strange immortality stalk the stage in this enthralling novel, which brings to vivid life the ordinary – and extraordinary – people caught up in a tectonic shift between East and West.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it’s not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

One night, Lucie begs her mother for a story. And so Aurore begins to recite incredible tales — of Lucie’s grandparents, and of her missing father, and of people who were part of Aurore’s life before Lucie. For 10 years, Aurore weaves a rich skein of tales for Lucie and Claire. Then, when the girls turn 15, Aurore tells the final tale in her tapestry, and disappears forever.

Several years later, Lucie gives birth to a little girl, Odyssee, and she and Claire take turns telling stories to the child. But one day something unspeakable happens. Into the terrible silence, a woman without a name wanders, trying to find the broken pieces of herself.

The Breakwater House is the story of the woman without a name. It is also the story of Lucie and Claire and Aurore and Suzanne — and the complex love between mothers, daughters, and friends. With this thrilling puzzle of a novel, Governor General’s Literary Award winner and Giller Prize nominee Pascale Quiviger shows that she is a writer who is capable of combining stylistic brilliance, philosophical depth, and sheer un-put-downable storytelling.

Novelist Christopher Knox began his writing career with a bang. The echo of that success still rings in his ears as he sets to work every morning on his second novel, ten years later. His wife feels like a single parent, and with Chris living in exile in a studio above their garage, it won’t be long before she is.

Chris discovers a fantasy novel by an obscure author he loved as a child and gives it to his son, David. Father reads to son nightly, and To the Four Directions soon enthralls him. Until one night, when young David is reading alone, an inexplicable seizure leaves him in a mysterious state of unconsciousness. As his seizure recurs every night, his father learns that only one thing will calm it, a bedtime story from his strange new book.
Convinced that the secret of David’s collapse is within its pages, Chris traverses the continent in search of the truth. Meanwhile, David wakes up within the story he has been reading, and as his father struggles to free him David struggles to survive, facing perils unimaginable in a world created to capture the hearts and souls of children like him. Both father and son are headed toward a fateful collision of worlds, and a showdown with ancient evils, both fictional and very real.

In 1968, into the devastating, spare atmosphere of the remote coastal town of Labrador, Canada, a child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor fully girl, but both at once. Only three people are privy to the secret: the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbor and midwife, Thomasina. Though Treadway makes the difficult decision to raise the child as a boy named Wayne, the women continue to quietly nurture the boy’s female side. And as Wayne grows into adulthood within the hyper-masculine hunting society of his father, his shadow-self, a girl he thinks of as “Annabel,” is never entirely extinguished.

Kathleen Winter has crafted a literary gem about the urge to unveil mysterious truth in a culture that shuns contradiction, and the body’s insistence on coming home. A daringly unusual debut full of unforgettable beauty, Annabel introduces a remarkable new voice to American readers.