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49th Shelf members can enter to win a copy of any of the books listed here (please sign up here if you haven’t already). At the end of the giveaway period, we do a random draw, and the publishers ship copies directly to the winners. Good luck!

Book cover: Bury the Lead (9781487012625)

Bury the Lead

A Quill & Packet Mystery

by (author) Kate Hilton & Elizabeth Renzetti

A big-city journalist joins the staff of a small-town paper in cottage country and finds a community full of secrets … and murder.

Cat Conway has recently returned to Port Ellis to work as a reporter at the Quill & Packet. She’s fled the tattered remains of her high-profile career and bad divorce for the holiday town of her childhood, famous for its butter tarts, theatre, and a century-old feud.

One of Cat’s first assignments is to interview legendary actor Eliot Fraser, the lead in the theatre’s season opener of Inherit the Wind. When Eliot ends up dead onstage on opening night, the curtain rises on the sleepy town’s secrets. The suspects include the actor whose career Eliot ruined, the ex-wife he betrayed, the women he abused, and even the baker he wronged. With the attention of the world on Port Ellis, this story could be Cat’s chance to restore her reputation. But the police think she’s a suspect, and the murderer wants to kill the story—and her too. Can Cat solve the mystery before she loses her job or becomes the next victim of a killer with a theatrical bent for vengeance?

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
60

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Book cover: Last Woman (9780771004148)

Last Woman

Stories

by (author) Carleigh Baker

From one of the country’s most celebrated new writers, a blistering collection of short fiction that is bracingly relevant, playfully irreverent, and absolutely unforgettable.

There’s a hole in the ozone layer. Are teenage girls to blame?

Floods and wildfires, toxic culture, billionaires in outer space, or a purse-related disaster while on mushrooms—in today’s hellscape world, there’s no shortage of things to worry about. Last Woman, the new collection of short fiction by award-winning author Carleigh Baker, wants you to know that you’re not alone. In these 13 brilliant new stories, Baker and her perfectly-drawn characters are here for you—in fact, they’re just as worried and weirded-out as everyone else.
A woman’s dream of poetic solitude turns out to be a recipe for loneliness. A retiree is convinced that his silence is the only thing that will prevent a deadly sinkhole. An emerging academic wakes up and chooses institutional violence. A young woman finds sisterhood in a strange fertility ritual, and an enigmatic empath is on a cleanse. Baker’s characters are both wildly misguided and a product of the misguided times in which we live. Through them we see our world askew and skewered—and, perhaps, we can begin to see it anew.

Carleigh Baker’s signature style is irreverent, but her heart is true—these stories delve into fear for the future, intergenerational misunderstandings, and the complexities of belonging with sharp wit and boundless empathy. With equal parts compassion and critique, she brings her clear-eyed attention to bear on our world, and the results are hilarious, heartbreaking, and startling in their freshness.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
56

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Book cover: How You Were Born (9781771668705)

How You Were Born

by (author) Kate Cayley
foreword by Alayna Munce

This tenth-anniversary edition of Kate Cayley's award-winning collection includes three new stories.

A young mother intrudes into the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what's best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin's predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures.

The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
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52

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Book cover: Princess of the Savoy (9781771624053)

Princess of the Savoy

A Priscilla Tempest Mystery, Book 3

by (author) Ron Base & Prudence Emery

Check back into London’s posh Savoy Hotel in the swinging sixties where dark forces and murder are uninvited guests—volume 3 in the cheeky series that is now a French bestseller.

Everything at London’s Savoy Hotel appears to be the picture of perfection: two Italian princes are checking in and an amorous English lord is taking photographs on the rooftop.

But in the Savoy Press Office, it’s a different picture entirely. There, Miss Priscilla Tempest is scrambling to avoid a boss who would like to be rid of her, a threatening American gangster, and the rather thrilling star of the Tarzan movies.

And it isn’t long before a fascist plot, hatched in an English country estate, arrives to truly ruin her day—and threaten British democracy.

In this third installment in Ron Base and Prudence Emery’s beloved series, reluctant Canadian crime-fighter Priscilla Tempest joins forces with her would-be lover—the ink-stained scribe of Fleet Street, Percy Hoskins—on a danger-filled adventure to untangle a deadly web of conspiracy that could get them both killed.

Sassy, suspenseful and always entertaining, Princess of the Savoy will delight readers looking to escape into a world of glamour, danger, treachery and a dead body or two—where there is always time for just one more cocktail, even when democracy itself is at stake.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
47

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Book cover: Here Is Still Here (9781773901480)

Here Is Still Here

by (author) Sivan Slapak

Where can one go when Here Is Still Here?

Raised in a family of post-war Jewish refugees in Canada, Isabel feels displaced from an early age. She's searching for love, purpose, and the true meaning of home. From Montreal to Jerusalem and back again, she navigates checkpoints and borders, home and exile, milestones and disappointment, love and loss.

Sivan Slapak's debut collection is an intimate and layered exploration of human connection and the complexities of identity. Told with compassion and wit, Here is Still Here is a poignant reminder that however far you may go, you remain yourself.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
32

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Book cover: The Sulphur Springs Cure (9781770867284)

The Sulphur Springs Cure

by (author) Jeffrey Round

Just before World War II, Violet and her parents visit the legendary Sulphur Springs Hotel. Famed for its curative waters, the spa attracts a diverse crowd. Some desperate for a cure, others for more intangible things.

During her time at the hotel, curious young Violet begins to suspect something devious is going on behind the luxury façade. It’s not until she unwittingly becomes party to a murder that she realizes how desperate people really are.

But it is never too late to make peace with your ghosts. At eighty-four years old, Violet travels back to the hotel, now in ruins, to recover clues to the forgotten murder. Her return brings back memories of her family, a much-missed girlhood friend, and of her own sexual awakening. But what happens when the past brings hurtful truths with it?

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
41

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Book cover: Motherlike (9781772603729)

Motherlike

by (author) Katherine Leyton

As soon as Katherine Leyton discovered she was pregnant, a powerful reckoning began. Motherlike is both a feminist memoir of new motherhood as well as a rumination on womanhood. A book for anyone interested in an honest and revealing look at a process that is essential to our experience as humans, and yet is routinely unexamined and dismissed.

Sharp and intensely candid, entertaining, and deeply poignant, Leyton weaves her own experience of becoming a mother to her son (the shocks, the strangeness, and the pleasures) with historical research and cultural commentary. Everything from the history of the birth control pill and the objectification of women's bodies to the risks of labor and the realities of being postpartum. Leyton invites us into a very personal story that reflects a larger picture of ourselves.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
34

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Book cover: Asterisms (9781990776717)

Asterisms

Poems

by (author) Donna Kane

An eclectic collection of poems that celebrates the universe and the natural world of which we are all a part.

Reflecting on subjects ranging from Comet NEOWISE to swallowtail butterflies to The Incredible Hulk, Kane’s new book is a thought-provoking follow up to her last collection, Orrery. Diverse in tone and subject matter, mixing humour and wonder, the poems in Asterisms take readers on a soul-stirring journey through the expansiveness of space and the interconnectedness of all life on earth.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
39

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Book cover: Oh Witness Dey! (9781771668767)

Oh Witness Dey!

by (author) Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.

In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements, and the legacies of our inheritance.

Giveaway period ends
Mar 31, 2024
Copies available
3
Members entered
35

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