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!
Firekeeper
A Novel
Nyla has an affinity to fire. A neglected teen in a small northern town—trying to escape a mother battling her own terrors—she is kicked out and struggles through life on the streets. Desperate for love, Nyla accidentally sets fire to her ex’s building and is then incarcerated for arson. Through community-led diversion, Nyla finds herself on a reserve as their firekeeper. But when climate change–induced wildfires threaten her new home, she knows intimately how to fight back.
The fourth book from acclaimed writer Katłıà brings a Northern Indigenous perspective to the destructive effects of ongoing colonialism. Displaying Katłıà’s enthralling storytelling style, Firekeeper is a coming-of-age tale that addresses intergenerational trauma by reclaiming culture, belonging and identity.
Join Nyla on her healing journey through the fire to sacred waters.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
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- 1
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- 55
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An Evening with Birdy O'Day
A funny, boisterous, and deeply moving novel about aging hairstylist Roland's childhood friendship with Birdy O'Day, whose fevered quest for pop music glory drives them apart
Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist who's lived and worked in Winnipeg all his life. He's more or less content with the quiet and predictable days he shares with his partner of twenty-five years, Tony. That is, until he hears that Birdy O'Day - washed-up music icon and Roland's childhood best friend and first love - is playing his first concert in Winnipeg since fleeing decades earlier.
Holing up with a scrapbook of news clippings about Birdy, Roland recalls his childhood in the '60s: Growing up poor with a single mother, he meets a boy at school who calls himself Birdy and is unlike anyone he's ever known. The two become inseparable, with Roland an eager sidekick to Birdy and his dreams of stardom. But when Birdy gets his big break, Roland is left behind, bereft. They become estranged over the years; one tours the world as a pop music sensation while the other struggles to chart a new path forward. But now, Birdy's imminent return to town is a chance for both of them to finally come to terms with their glorious yet troubled past.
A funny and poignant novel about hero worship, heartbreak, and queer survival, An Evening with Birdy O'Day will remind you that you can never go home again - even if you never left it in the first place.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 48
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A Season in Chezgh'un
A Novel
A subversive novel by acclaimed Cree author Darrel J. McLeod, infused with the contradictory triumph and pain of finding conventional success in a world that feels alien.
James, a talented and conflicted Cree man from a tiny settlement in Northern Alberta, has settled into a comfortable middle-class life in Kitsilano, a trendy neighbourhood of Vancouver. He is living the life he had once dreamed of—travel, a charming circle of sophisticated friends, a promising career and a loving relationship with a caring man—but he chafes at being assimilated into mainstream society, removed from his people and culture.
The untimely death of James’s mother, his only link to his extended family and community, propels him into a quest to reconnect with his roots. He secures a job as a principal in a remote northern Dakelh community but quickly learns that life there isn’t the fix he’d hoped it would be: His encounters with poverty, cultural disruption and abuse conjure ghosts from his past that drive him toward self-destruction. During the single year he spends in northern BC, James takes solace in the richness of the Dakelh culture—the indomitable spirit of the people, and the splendour of nature—all the while fighting to keep his dark side from destroying his life.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
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- 1
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- 48
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Pale Grey Dot
Three members of an elite team of operatives—once so close they were like family—are living in disgraced exile after a mission gone horribly wrong. But, they are thrown back into action when the solar system’s Jupiter Station is attacked from within. It will take all the tricks and tech they have to sort out the truth behind the official reports, and no small amount of courage to fight back against the system’s totalitarian government, in this exciting sci-fi debut novel from pillar of the Toronto science fiction community, Don Miasek.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 41
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Hides
Hides is a novel of family and politics that distinguishes itself through its careful intermingling of seriousness and comedy, and its surreal but eerily plausible setting.
As wildfires rage across the country and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a wilderness hunting trip in northwestern Newfoundland to commemorate the death of one of their sons, killed in a mass shooting in Calgary the year before. Hides traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships and father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 42
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Who Will Bury You?
And Other Stories
Intimate stories about Zimbabweans in moments of transition that force them to decide who they really are and choose the people they call their own.
Set in Toronto and Zimbabwe, the twelve elegant stories in Who Will Bury You? touch on themes of loss, identity, and inequality as they follow the lives of Zimbabweans who often feel like they are on the outside looking in. A mother and daughter navigate new relationship dynamics when the daughter comes out as a lesbian. Two sisters wonder what will hold them together after their grandmother’s death. A daughter tries to tell her father she loves him as she prepares to leave home for the first time. A journalist takes her grieving mother on a trip to report on girls who are allegedly being abducted by mermaids. A girl born to be the river god’s wife becomes a hero when chaos breaks out in the mighty Zambezi. A group of mothers discover just how far they are willing to go to protect their children during wartime.
Ephemeral yet beautifully satisfying, the stories in Chido Muchemwa's debut collection ask what makes people leave home, what makes them come back, and what keeps them there.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
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- 1
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- 43
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Who by Fire
Haunted by a childhood of picking locks and tailing suspects with her private-eye dad, Dame Polara desperately wants to leave the mysteries behind and lead an average life with average ambitions: to preserve heritage buildings through her job at City Hall, to care for her father’s mounting health complications, and to one day raise a family of her own.
But when her landlord serves her an eviction notice, and Dame agrees to investigate his wife’s infidelity in exchange for keeping the apartment. A simple domestic case, or so Dame believes, until her investigation uncovers a serial arsonist targeting the very buildings she’s fighting to preserve.
When this new mystery reopens old wounds, Dame must use every trick her father taught her to discover the truth and protect those she loves — lest the dangers of the job catch up to her and burn her whole life to the ground.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 50
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Sisters of the Spruce
World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic trees, desperately needed for the Allies’ aircrafts in Europe. At a camp on the inlet, Khya’s father, Sannosuke—a talented, daring logger with twenty years of experience since immigrating from Japan—assumes a position of leadership among the Japanese and Chinese workers.
But the arrival of a group of white loggers, eager to assert their authority, throws off balance the precarious life that Khya and her family have begun to establish. When a quarrel between Sannosuke and a white man known as “the Captain” escalates, leading to the betrayal of her older sister, Izzy, and humiliation for the family, Khya embarks on a perilous journey with her one friend—a half-Chinese sex worker, on the lam for her own reasons—to track down the man and force him to take responsibility. Yet nothing in the forest is as it appears. Can they save Izzy from ruination and find justice without condemning her to a life of danger, or exposing themselves to the violence of an angry, power-hungry man?
Drawing on inspiration from her ancestors’ stories and experiences, Shimotakahara weaves an entrancing tale of female adventure, friendship, and survival.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 41
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Here Is Still Here
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
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
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- 42
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Hiroshima Bomb Money
Through the lives of three siblings living in Hiroshima, Japan, Terry Watada explores the sweep of history during the years 1930 to 1945, known in Japan as the Fifteen Year War. The youngest, Chisato Akamatsu, travels to Canada looking for a new life and runs into unexpected brutalities in immigration, a troubled marriage and the humiliation of the internment in her new home during World War Two. Hideki, the only brother, joins the military to fight for the Emperor and find "glory" in China. What he finds is the fallacy of patriotism, the brutality of war, and the futility of existence. Chiemi, the oldest, was in the city when to the atom bomb hit. She then desperately searches for her twin babies. The three encapsulate the hopes, fears, dreams, the inhumanity of the period and resiliency of humans caught in historic eventsThe bomb money, a mass of melted coins found after the bomb blast, stands as a symbol of the fate of the family. In his fourth novel, Canadian poet, dramatist, and novelist Terry Watada delves into the Pacific War, looking at WWII from a Japanese perspective, unique in Canadian literature.
- Giveaway period ends
- Jan 01, 2025
- Copies available
- 1
- Members entered
- 41
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