Enter for a Chance to Win Free Books!
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!
The Wedding
A Novel
You’re invited to The Wedding, an electrifying novel about the joining of two South Asian families, and the secrets, resentments, and unspoken truths boiling just beneath the surface.
Interweaving themes of identity, culture clashes, and the immigrant experience as found in The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri with the exuberance and sharp humour of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, Gurjinder Basran delivers a wide-ranging but intimate portrait of a vibrant, complex Sikh community.
Set in Vancouver and Surrey, BC, The Wedding exposes the inner lives of the wedding party, guests and event staff in the lead-up to a lavish wedding. This novel, centered around the impending marriage of Devi and Baby, illustrates the union of two people, two families and all the ways in which an entire community bears witness, ensnares and uplifts itself.
Like all great Bollywood films, The Wedding is rife with family drama, steeped in tradition and an ode to love in all its forms. With humour, nuance and honesty, The Wedding spills the chai—exploring desire and expectation, suffering and judgment, class and race—all in search of a happy enough ever after.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 65
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
This Bright Dust
As the Great Depression winds down and war in Europe looms, the small Prairie community of Grayley is all but abandoned. After a decade of dust and drought, few families remain. With growing season approaching, Abel Dodds and the Wisharts decide to plant their crops once again — their last chance to make a living on their debt-burdened farms. But when they learn of an impending royal visit, tensions ignite between the neighbours.
Deeply rooted in the landscape of the Prairies and laced with contemporary concerns, This Bright Dust deftly explores the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. In a richly layered novel, Berkhout tells a moving tale of promise and disillusionment, of near disaster and the cultivation of joy.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 61
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
An Astonishment of Stars
Stories
A beautifully written short story collection that charts the lives of racialized women as they navigate their relationships, aspirations, and the burdens of memory and expectations
“Sharply observed and gracefully told, this is a collection shining with all the unexpected delights and defeats that make up a life.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
The wife who uses the name of her white husband in public. The mother who cleans the small-town hospital while her daughter moves to the city to forget their shared past. The well-behaved teen girl who anxiously watches her older sister slip further and further away from their hovering parents. Each of these characters is both familiar and singular, reminding us of women we have been, of our mothers and daughters, neighbors and adversaries.
Kirti Bhadresa is a keen observer of humanity, especially of the BIPOC women whose domestic and professional work is the backbone of late-stage capitalism but whose lives receive so little attention in mainstream culture. An Astonishment of Stars is a collection that sees those who are unseen and cuts to the heart of contemporary womanhood, community collisions, and relationships both chosen and forced upon us.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 54
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Stories
A breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman, from the Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth.
What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.
A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.
With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 69
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
These Songs I Know By Heart
Married and divorced in her 20s, looking for friendship in her 30s, and contemplating pregnancy at 40, our narrator wonders if she’s going through life out of order. But Alice, The Turtle, The Kid, and other beloveds show her that motherhood is more than giving birth, art is never finished, and love is not linear.
Through a three-day canoe trip, chance encounters, fierce female friendship, step-parenting, IVF, pandemic isolation, and quiet moments between humans, These Songs I Know By Heart weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. With razor-sharp reflection, humour, and most of all love, we are reminded that there’s no formula to life and that instead, we must celebrate what makes the small moments of our lives extraordinary.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 56
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Bad Land
A slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands
Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina's brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez - a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak - upending Regina's quiet life.
It's clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won't come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through the plains and mountains of Alberta's badlands to the coast of BC, forcing Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.
By turns thrilling and heartwarming, rife with gothic tension, and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 59
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
The Game of Giants
A novel about the unpredictability of parenthood, a journey into the unchartered territory that is having a child, especially when that child turns out to be different.
Rose Drury has just learned that her son, Roger, is below average—at the third-percentile rank, according to the pediatrician. Co-parenting with her partner, Lucy, in a 1980s Calgary only just starting to accept same-sex relationships, Rose works to unearth her own desires from the quagmire of directives from others, while she grapples with the implications of Roger's developmental delays.
Though Rose herself is a developmental psychologist and knows all of the "right" answers and "correct" things to do, she finds that she is all too human, struggling with the many social forces that converge on a mother of a kid who is different. With humour and desperation in equal measure, Rose reviews her life history for the definitive moment that could explain how she and her son got to this point.
In this sparkling and empathetic novel, Marion Douglas digs into a young mother's uncertainty, fear, and hard-won wisdom as she and her son—an odd and lovable giant of unpredictability—forge a path forward.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 50
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
The Rasmussen Papers
A delightfully cunning, sharply insightful novel about ambition and subterfuge from the author of the Giller-longlisted novel A Beauty.
This novel's unnamed narrator is so obsessed with the desire to write the biography of her literary hero, the late poet Marianne Rasmussen, that she assumes a false name and talks her way into the house of Rasmussen's former lover, Aubrey Ash. She gets more than a foot in the door--she moves in as a lodger, gaining precious daily contact with frail, crusty, almost-centenarian Aubrey and his handsome, younger (but hardly young) brother Harry.
The would-be biographer tries to ingratiate herself with both the Ash Brothers. She flatters Aubrey and she flirts with Harry, but the harder she tries to get her hands on the coveted prize—access to the Rasmussen papers--the more she gets tangled in a trap that might just be of her own making. Can she resist the temptation to possess, by any means, the letters, photographs and first drafts that could unlock the secret to Marianne Rasmussen's genius?
The Rasmussen Papers is a brilliant reply to Henry James' The Aspern Papers. Connie Gault flips James' story on its head and slides it into contemporary Toronto's Cabbagetown, among the marginalized and dispossessed, people the narrator studies as intently as she studies everyone she meets--until a confrontation on a streetcar makes her reconsider the limits of what you can know of another's story, and how hidden we all are, especially from ourselves.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 56
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Celestina's House
It begins with an act of betrayal that destroys the tenuous bonds of Celestina Errantes’s family. For years afterwards, Celestina longs for an escape from her unhappy home. Then an unexpected gift from her wealthy Lolo offers that chance: a long-forsaken property in Manila’s bohemian district, close to where ladies of the evening ply their trade. It is no place for a proper young woman, but this house, even with its ghosts, makes Celestina feel at home.
Celestina tears into life, losing herself in the pleasures of the night, but soon finds that the emptiness within her is not easily filled. When finally a true chance at happiness promises to save her, a sinister voice from the past returns, threatening to destroy it all.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 54
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
A darkly humorous family saga set in Nova Scotia about a young woman coming of age in a family that believes it's cursed, for fans of Emma Straub and Lesley Crewe.
Kitten Love's family is haunted by the memory of her teenaged aunt, Nerida, who died just days before Kitten's birth in 1970. Her mother, Queena, believes the family is cursed, and she's determined not to let disaster strike again. She won't let Kitten out of her sight—especially to visit the beaches that surround the town. She's built a bomb shelter to protect against Soviet attack, and she's desperate to protect her husband, Stubby, from the fatal and mysterious Love Heart.
Kitten thinks she knows how to defeat their curse: magic. But when protection spells and clues from tarot cards aren't enough to save Stubby, Kitten turns her back on the things that make her life magical, and Queena turns her back on reality. She preserves everything as it was the day Stubby died in 1987—from the gold shag rug in the bathroom to the Duran Duran posters in Kitten's room. Kitten, herself, is forbidden to change.
Kitten tastes freedom when she falls in love and moves to British Columbia, but reinventing herself without the curse is harder than she expects. Tragedy and her own reliance on magical thinking eventually lead her back home to Queena, her brother Thom, and Aunt Bunny, who are equally stuck in their pasts. When tarot cards begin mysteriously showing up in her room, warning of a betrayal and encouraging an unlikely romance, she's certain someone is watching her. Could the heartbreak that almost destroyed Kitten's family be the very thing that helps them move on?
A darkly humorous family saga woven around tarot cards and a mixtape of '80s songs, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic is a heady mix of music, ghosts, love, and nostalgia.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 62
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.