Canada Historical Fiction

On a summer evening in 1952, young sisters Zina and Presendia run hand-in-hand into the wooded hills of upstate New York, fleeing their family farmhouse as it collapses into flames. Deep in the Adirondack mountains, they en­counter a gritty band of “settlers” occupying a dilapidated sportsmen’s complex nestled along a secluded mountain lake. The girls soon be­come inculcated in the spiritual training and rustic hedonism of the group, attracting the interest of its profane but visionary founder: a rough-necked charismatic named Peter.

A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them.

A mystery and a love story spanning five decades, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an epic portrait of passion and ambition, set against the beautiful, brutal landscape of Newfoundland. In this acclaimed novel, Johnston has created two of the most memorable and irreversibly intertwined characters in modern fiction: Joey Smallwood, who claws his way up from poverty to become Newfoundland's first premier; and Sheilagh Fielding, who renounces her father's wealth to become a popular columnist and writer, a gifted satirist who casts a haunting shadow on Smallwood's life and career.

"El evangelio según Judas, por Benjamín Iscariote" arroja nueva luz sobre el misterio de Judas, incluyendo sus motivos para traicionar a Jesús y lo que le sucedió después de la crucifixión. Partiendo de los textos canónicos como referencia, presenta una nueva versión de la historia de Jesús desde los ojos de Judas. Aparentemente escrita por el hijo de Judas, Benjamín, en el estilo narrativo de los Evangelios, este audiolibro supone una recreación provocativa, estimulante y polémica.

Growing up on the Bay of Fundy, Azuba Galloway dreams of going to sea. She watches magnificent ships slowly making their way into Whelan’s Cove, the sense of exoticism bursting from their holds along with foreign goods. As a young woman, Azuba marries a seasoned merchant sea captain, Nathaniel Bradstock. Unwilling to have him away at sea for most of their married life, and anxious to see far shores, she extracts a promise that he will take her with him. But Azuba becomes pregnant soon after they marry, and Nathaniel knows too well the perils of life on a ship.

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos...The king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, rules as Protector. Radical Protestants are conducting all-out war on the old religion, stirring discontent among the people. The Protector's prolonged war with Scotland is proving a disastrous failure. Worst of all, the economy is in collapse, inflation rages, and rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards—some strange and other-worldly—but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

In The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald takes us back to the early 1960’s, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War—a world filtered through the imagination of Madeleine McCarthy, a spirited nine-year-old. Unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in his own web of secrets, she at first welcomes her family’s posting to a sleepy air force base in southern Ontario.

Dans le Montréal des années 1940, tous les espoirs sont permis. Mariée à Maurice, Jeanne doit mener une lutte incessante pour assurer la survie de ses enfants et l'harmonie de sa famille. Le récit d'une époque où le dévouement et la générosité se dressaient devant les petits et les grands malheurs du monde.

Theresa Bateman, a struggling junior art historian in Toronto, receives a single tarot card in the mail. The image is unmistakably the work of celebrated avant-garde artist Lark Ringold, and its discovery would mean a breakthrough in Theresa's career. But the legendary Ringold Tarot doesn't exist. . . . Its paintings were lost in a fire that claimed Lark's life along with dozens of others—the final, horrific implosion of a notorious cult called the Shown.

The time is our own time. The place, Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, which is steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition - and forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in the West, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human-rights group to work with officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and to devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Moderna and Regio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote English village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artefacts—coins, fragments of glass, human bones—which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death?

Vallée-du-Richelieu, hiver 1905. Aldée, une adolescente maigrichonne, a le cœur brisé quand elle doit quitter la ferme paternelle et abandonner son ambition de devenir institutrice. Hélas, pour éviter la famine, son père a besoin du salaire qu'elle obtiendra en se mettant au service du bourgeois de la ville.

Tanzania, 1956. A Maasai woman gives birth to a child with albinism. The child is seen as a curse upon her tribe, and so begins Pó's tumultuous story. As Pó navigates the world, she must claim her life in the face of violence and ostracism. Further south, in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique, Ezequiel struggles for acceptance, too. Adopted by missionaries, he is not recognized by his Portuguese father's community or by his Makonde mother's tribe. When civil war erupts, he must choose whom to fight for and whom to leave behind.

Louis Riel arrives at Batoche in 1884 to help the Métis fight for their lands and discovers that the rebellious outsider Josette Lavoie is a granddaughter of the famous chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally. But Josette learns of Riel’s hidden agenda—to establish a separate state with his new church at its head—and refuses to help him. Only when the great Gabriel Dumont promises her that he will not let Riel fail does she agree to join the cause.

At the turn of the 19th century, naval officer David Buchan arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk or "Red Indians", the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area's most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend.

In a remote Newfoundland outpost at the onset of the Second World War, the young Catholic Wish Furey meets the passionate, independent 16-year-old Protestant Sadie Parsons. They begin an intense affair that is cut short as prejudice and mistrust drive Wish away, into the British Army and the war. At home in Newfoundland, Sadie turns her back on her family and moves to St. John's to wait for Wish - until she receives word that he is dead. Fifty years later, Sadie returns to Newfoundland to scatter her American husband's ashes and to face her past.

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As Chamberlain’s plane judders across the Channel and the Fürher’s train steams relentlessly south from Berlin, two young men travel with secrets of their own. Hugh Legat is one of Chamberlain’s private secretaries, Paul Hartmann a German diplomat and member of the anti-Hitler resistance. Great friends at Oxford before Hitler came to power, they haven’t seen one another since they were last in Munich together six years earlier. Now, as the future of Europe hangs in the balance, their paths are destined to cross again.