Michael Decter’s compelling novel is a portrait of a man, shaken by injustice and searching for his family history
Matthew Rice is a successful sixty-year-old Toronto politician, who finds himself suddenly unmoored after serving jury duty on a devastating child murder case.
Matthew retreats to Quarry Island in Georgian Bay, where he loses his wallet in a boating mishap. Among the pieces of identification he needs to replace, he is shocked to learn his birth certificate is a forgery and a lie. Not only have the foundations of his life given way, his very identity is shattered.
As Matthew’s desire to uncover the identity of his real birth mother sparks an investigation that will take him from Sydney to Boston to Dublin and back to the rocky shores of Quarry Island, readers are drawn into Shadow Life’s atmospheric and delicate web where memory and myth will ultimately collide to reveal self-discovery and new love.
Now available on bookshelves everywhere.
A startling exploration of the past and present of Antisemitism
What is Antisemitism, and why does it happen?
From one of Canada’s most bold and adventurous thinkers, Philip Slayton looks at the very different experiences of Jews in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and America, and the longstanding tensions between Jews and Muslims, and Jews and Christians. He examines the Holocaust, which brought the fight against antisemitism to new heights, and Zionism, which has set the fight back immeasurably. The role of media and particularly social media in spreading antisemitism is scrutinized. Identity Politics is found to have sidelined Jews in favor of other historically oppressed populations.
Antisemitism is published by Sutherland House, sutherlandhousebooks.com.
See other books by the author and subscribe to his newsletter, Endgame, at philipslayton.com.
Revisit Johannes Vermeer through Tim Brook’s critical darling work, Vermeer’s Hat
A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's.
In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
In honour of the sold-out, blockbuster Vermeer exhibit taking place until June 2023, at The Rijks Museum, we invite you to reacquaint yourself Timothy Brook’s classic work,Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World.
Available on Amazon.
An irresistible tale of reluctant dog ownership full of heart, humor, and wisdom
From award-winning Chatelaine columnist and author, Rona Maynard recounts her personal and heartwarming story of dog adoption in, Starter Dog.
Advance praise for Starter Dog:
“When you buy yourself a copy of this funny, honest adventure of a book (and you must), you’re going to want to clear a few hours and read every word. God, Rona Maynard is a good writer.” — Abigail Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of A Three Dog Life and Still Life at Eighty
“Starter Dog is an enchanting love story between a pet and his human. Rona Maynard shows us with marvelous wit and sensitivity how the world is expanded and enhanced by the companionship of a dog.” — Hilma Wolitzer, author of Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories
On bookselves April 18.
From the author of the riveting The Midwife of Venice, a fresh and sweeping historical novel following a Jewish woman attempting to bring justice to her family on the eve of World War II.
New York City, 1938: At the height of the Great Depression, a time when President Roosevelt is trying to keep America out of World War II, Giddy Brodsky is lucky to have a job as a cigarette girl at a Manhattan jazz club. Nevertheless, she dreams of establishing a cosmetics business and leaving the poverty-stricken Lower East Side tenements behind. She has lived there with her family ever since they fled Russia, forced to emigrate after a group of Cossacks burned down their village, and her memories continue to haunt her.
Giddy tries to focus on the future until, during an evening streetcar ride, she thinks she recognizes one of the Cossacks who changed her life forever. Determined to get answers, she enlists the help of Carter van der Zalm, the Chief Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island, who is hunting the same man. He suspects the Russian is involved in an assassination plot that will destroy American and Soviet relations, and he enlists Giddy to moonlight as a spy for him. But when she finally tracks down the man they’re both seeking, she finds herself in the middle of a shocking political conspiracy that changes everything she once held true.
In the tradition of Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept and Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, The Jazz Club Spy is a glittering and gritty look at pre-WWII America, and the personal battle one woman wages between justice and forgiveness.
Available December 5.
simonandschuster.com
More to come
New announcements to come from beloved authors Donna Morrissey (Penguin Random House Canada, late 2023), Terry Fallis (McClelland & Stewart, 2023), Ken McGoogan (Douglas & McIntyre, 2023), Rabbi Michael Zedek (Sutherland House, 2023), and Shelly Sanders (HarperCollins Canada and USA, 2024).