Our October Author of the Month: ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Stranger’s Child; and The Sparsholt Affair. He has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.

In his new novel, Our Evenings, Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates. Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on — through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security. From “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe), Our Evenings sweeps readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.

Our September Author of the Month: HEATHER O'NEILL

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads was a #1 national bestseller and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award.

Her new novel, The Capital of Dreams, is a breathtaking dark fairy tale of survival and betrayal. Fourteen-year-old Sofia Bottom lives in a small country that Europe has forgotten. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and fairies who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. No one, from the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, is as revered as Sofia’s brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can Sofia, with a tin ear and an enduring love of the old myths, ever hope to win her mother’s love? When the country’s greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, at last Clara turns to her daughter. Sofia must smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, and Sofia runs for her life, losing her mother’s most prized possession.

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Our July Author of the Month: KEVIN BARRY

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.

The Heart in Winter is one of the year’s most anticipated books — a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Canadian Independent Bookstore Day 2024

Canadian Independent Bookstore Day is taking place on Saturday, April 27!

This year we're celebrating with contests. Two of them to be specific:

In our own McNally Robinson contest, every purchase made with us on April 27th will be eligible to enter a draw to win a prize pack filled with an assortment of books. Customers who purchase items in-store will be given a ballot to fill out, and customers who purchase on our website will be entered automatically. The winners will be determined the week following and contacted directly about their prizes.

The second contest is put on by our friends at the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association (CIBA). This year, CIBA is giving away five gift cards to Canadian independent bookstores. Four readers will win $200 each to the independent bookstore of their choice and one very lucky winner will win the grand prize of $1,000 to their favourite indie! In this contest, each book purchased at a Canadian indie bookseller (including McNally Robinson!) is worth one entry, so the more books you buy the more entries you can submit. Better yet, books written/illustrated by a Canadian are worth double. Books can be purchased online, by phone, or in-store. Once you've got your receipt (or in the case of online orders, your confirmation email), you will visit CIBA's website to submit your entries. You may visit their website now to read all of the details about the CIBA contest.

These contests are open at all of our bookstores and on our website, but only on April 27th. Our bookstores are open 10 AM to 9 PM that day, and online purchases made between 12:00 AM and 11:59 PM are eligible. So we'll see you then for Canadian Independent Bookstore Day!

Thank you to everyone for continuining to support Canadian independent bookselling. We've been Canada's largest indie bookseller for over 40 years, and that's all thanks to readers like you!

Thanks also to the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association for their support all these years, and to the publishers who have helped us put together our contest prizes (not to mention all the resources they provide to help get books into the hands of our readers!).