Winnipeg Free Press Book Club
Originally designed to help ease some of the isolation-related boredom, the Winnipeg Free Press runs a monthly book club which will run completely online and is open to anyone and everyone to join.
Each month, the Free Press will choose a book and share it on their website, as well as in an email to those who have registered to participate. They will send a couple of follow up notes to check in on your progress and suggest a few discussion topics and questions to think about as you go.
At the end of the month, participants will gather in a livestream book club meeting, hosted by the Free Press books editor, Ben Sigurdson, or one of us from McNally Robinson, as well as the author of the book.
You’ll be able to submit questions ahead of time, or drop them into one of the live chat boxes during the meeting. (And don’t worry, the Free Press provide an easy-to-access link to the stream, so all you have to do is click.)
Below is a list of recent Book Club picks, including this month's choice. Visit the Winnipeg Free Press' website to find out which is the current pick.
The Riveter
- Jack Wang 
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A cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe in WWII.
Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to serve his country in the war against fascism, but Chinese Canadians are barred from joining the army out of fear they might expect citizenship in return. So, Josiah heads to the shipyard to find work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships.
One night, Josiah spots Poppy singing at a navy club. Despite their different backgrounds, they fall for each other instantly and begin a starry-eyed romance that lasts until the harsh reality of their situation is made clear. Determined to prove himself, Josiah takes a train to Toronto where he's finally given the chance to enlist. After volunteering for the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion and jumping into Normandy on D-Day, he must fight through the battlefields of Europe to make it back to the woman he loves.
By turns harrowing and exhilarating, The Riveter explores what one man must sacrifice to belong to the only country he has ever called home.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
- Shashi Bhat
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Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize o Finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award o A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year o An Apple Canada Best Ebooks of 2024 o A CBC Books' Best Canadian Fiction of 2024
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.
Fungal
- Ariel Gordon
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Fungal is a wide-ranging collection from Ariel Gordon where she explores her fascination with all mushrooms, not just those you can eat.
In these engaging essays she takes the reader through ditches and puddles in search of morels, through the hallways of a mushroom factory, down city sidewalks and beside riverbanks as she considers all things found and fungal. Along the way there are entertaining stories of the perils of mushroom identification, including mailed mushrooms that have liquefied, or terrifying thoughts of Canadian geese being fed hallucinogenic mushrooms, as well as a thoughtful analysis of the ways mushrooms knit our ecosystems together and the ways we knit our lives and communities together. Smart, funny and poetic, Gordon moves seamlessly from the natural world to the personal in these essays, examining the interconnectedness of all things and delighting in the rich variety of the world around her.
Prairie Edge
- Conor Kerr
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Shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize o Finalist for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize o A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year o One of CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024
The Giller Prize-longlisted author of Avenue of Champions returns with a frenetic, propulsive crime thriller that doubles as a sharp critique of modern activism and challenges readers to consider what "Land Back" might really look like.
Meet Isidore "Ezzy" Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey's uncle's old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences.
For readers drawn to the electric storytelling of Morgan Talty and the taut register of Stephen Graham Jones, Conor Kerr's Prairie Edge is at once a gripping, darkly funny caper and a raw reckoning with the wounds that persist across generations.
Wînipêk
- Niigaan Sinclair
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From ground zero of this country's most important project: reconciliation
Niigaan Sinclair has been called provocative, revolutionary, and one of this country's most influential thinkers on the issues impacting Indigenous cultures, communities, and reconciliation in Canada. In his debut collection of stories, observations, and thoughts about Winnipeg, the place he calls "ground zero" of Canada's future, read about the complex history and contributions of this place alongside the radical solutions to injustice and violence found here, presenting solutions for a country that has forgotten principles of treaty and inclusivity. It is here, in the place where Canada began--where the land, water, people, and animals meet-- that a path "from the centre" is happening for all to see.
At a crucial and fragile moment in Canada's long history with Indigenous peoples, one of our most essential writers begins at the centre, capturing a web spanning centuries of community, art, and resistance.
Based on years' worth of columns, Niigaan Sinclair delivers a defining essay collection on the resilience of Indigenous peoples. Here, we meet the creators, leaders, and everyday people preserving the beauty of their heritage one day at a time. But we also meet the ugliest side of colonialism, the Indian Act, and the communities who suffer most from its atrocities.
Sinclair uses the story of Winnipeg to illuminate the reality of Indigenous life all over what is called Canada. This is a book that demands change and celebrates those fighting for it, that reminds us of what must be reconciled and holds accountable those who must do the work. It's a book that reminds us of the power that comes from loving a place, even as that place is violently taken away from you, and the magic of fighting your way back to it.
The Lightning Bottles
- Marissa Stapley
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INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The author of New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick Lucky returns with a spellbinding story of rock 'n' roll and star-crossed love--about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre's journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier.
He was the troubled face of rock 'n' roll...until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.
Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock n' roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she's perhaps the most hated--and least understood--woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart--even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.
But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band's meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn't anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door--a Lightning Bottles superfan--who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah still alive, he's also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find them right away.
A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is both a love letter to the 90s and a searing portrait of the cost of fame.
The Last Secret
- Maia Caron
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oINSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERo
A sweeping, dazzling dual-timeline novel centering on two unforgettable women--and their inextricable link to each other decades apart.
Ukraine, 1944
As the world around her is ripped apart by war and infiltrated by Nazi soldiers, Savka Ivanets works as a medic for the Ukrainian resistance, stitching wounds by day, stealing supplies by night, and dodging firefights between the SS and Soviet partisans. When her husband, Marko, a reluctant member of the Waffen-SS, forces her to deliver a coded message to an underground bunker, she's terrified. But when her mission doesn't go as planned, and her son, Taras, is kidnapped by the KGB, Savka fears she'll never see him again.
Salt Spring Island, 1972
For Jeanie Esterhazy, the world, with its whispers and curious eyes, is too much to bear. Ever since the horrific accident that left her badly scarred, Jeanie, unable to remember anything about that awful day, has pulled away from society, utterly isolated.
Then a mysterious stranger appears at her house, and Jeanie suddenly begins having flashbacks about the night of her wedding--flashbacks that hold answers to the questions she's had for years; flashbacks that make her realize the world around her is not as it seems.
Weaving together Savka and Jeanie's stories with artful precision, The Last Secret is at once luminous and transporting, a brilliant and impossible-to-forget story of love, hope, and the breathtaking resilience of women.
Pinching Zwieback
- Mitch Toews
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These loosely linked stories read like a novel. Lives are given form by the past but undergo change as the world reshapes beliefs and circumstances. Focusing on recurrent, related characters with a common reality: small town Mennonite life, this powerful collection connects us to the author's own background and experiences.
What's Not Mine
- Nora Decter
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"Nora Decter has written a wrenching, knowing, and wry novel about coming of age into a rough world." -- Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion
For fans of Miriam Toews, an absorbing, darkly funny story of family, addiction, and survival
The summer Bria Powers turns 16 is sinister. Waves of insects plague her hometown of Beauchamp, where fentanyl has recently infiltrated the drug stream. Forest fires muddy the normally wide-open skies, and everything smells like a barbecue all the time. It's also the summer Bria goes from having saved a life to ruining her own.
Since her drug-dealing father disappeared and his girlfriend overdosed, Bria has lived with her aunt Tash and best friend/cousin Ains. By day, Bria and Ains babysit Ains's younger siblings and sling fast food at Burger Shack. But at night, Bria has her own secret world, sneaking out to see Someboy, an older guy who captivates her sometimes. Other times, he angers-insults-upends her, and that has a certain charm too.
But trouble comes for Beauchamp and for Bria in the form of bears that wander into town, dick pics texted from a mystery number, and a creeping dependence on what Bria should hate most of all.
Steeped in tragicomedy and written in starkly observed prose, What's Not Mine explores inheritance, addiction, and survival when the odds are against you.
An Evening with Birdy O'Day
- Greg Kearney
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Finalist, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
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.
mmm... Manitoba
- Kimberley Moore , Janis Thiessen
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A tasty oral history
In 2018, Janis Thiessen, Kimberley Moore, and collaborator Kent Davies refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab. Together they embarked on a journey around Manitoba, gathering stories about the province's food and the people who make, sell, and eat it. Along the way, they visited restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the food truck. The team conducted nearly seventy interviews and indulged in a bounty of prairie delicacies, from Winnipeg's "Fat Boys" to Steinbach's perogies to Churchill's cloudberry jam.
Thiessen and Moore serve up the results of this research in mmm... Manitoba. Mixing recipes, maps, archival records, biographies, and full-colour photographs with fascinating stories, they showcase the province's diverse food histories. Through the sharing and preparing of food, the authors investigate food security and regulation, Indigenous foodways and agriculture, capitalism's impact on the agri-food industry, and the networks between Manitoban food producers and retailers. The book also explores the roles of gender, ethnicity, migration, and colonialism in Manitoba's food history.
Hop on the Manitoba Food History Truck and journey into the province's past with engaging essays and easy-to-follow recipes for kjielkje and schmauntfat, snow goose tidbits, chicken karaage, the Salisbury House flapper pie, duck fat smashed potatoes, Ichi Ban cocktails, pork inihaw, and more. mmm... Manitoba offers a thoughtfully nuanced, deliciously digestible, and wholly unique regional history that is sure to satisfy.
Twistical Nature of Spoons, The
- Patti Grayson
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Blisse has guarded the family secret for her entire childhood. No one can know the origin of her unconventional birthday gifts Her mother, Ina, has insisted that Blisse never tell a soul - believing it's the only way to keep her daughter safe from a dire fate. Together, mother and daughter must sift through their own versions of events to understand how the secret has led to the unravelling of their lives. Chock-full of masks and curses, art and magic, seduction and spoons, their stories are both fraught with misdirection and awash in whimsy. Can their revelations negate a tragic prediction? Or is the dissolution of love and family inevitable?
An Ordinary Violence
- Adriana Chartrand
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Terrible things happen side by side with the ordinary.
Dawn hasn't spoken to her brother, Cody, since he was sent to prison for a violent crime seven years ago. But when Dawn's seemingly perfect life in the big city implodes, she is forced to return to her childhood home and the prairie city that still holds so much pain for her and her fractured family. Cody is released from prison with a mysterious new friend by his side, and Dawn must follow increasingly sinister leads to uncover their nefarious plans to access a dangerous supernatural network. As the lines between right and wrong blur and dissolve, Dawn recons with trauma and violence, loss and reclamation in an unsettling world where spirit realms entwine with the living-and where it is humans who carry out the truly monstrous acts.
Moon of the Turning Leaves
- Waubgeshig Rice
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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Twelve years after the lights go out . . .
An epic journey to a forgotten homeland
The hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow.
In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they've been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in a world after everything, Evan's people are stronger than ever. But resources around their new settlement are drying up, and elders warn that they cannot stay indefinitely.
Evan and his teenaged daughter, Nangohns, are chosen to lead a scouting party on a months-long trip down to their traditional home on the shores of Lake Huron--to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life--and what danger--still exists in the lands to the south.
Waubgeshig Rice's exhilarating return to the world first explored in Moon of the Crusted Snow is a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth.
Valley of the Birdtail
- Andrew Stobo Sniderman , Douglas Sanderson
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THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner - 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
Winner - 2023 John W. Dafoe Book Prize
Winner - 2023 High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writer
Winner - 2022 Manitoba Historical Society Margaret McWilliams Book Award for Local History
Winner - 2023 Quebec Writers' Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and Concordia University First Book Prize
Finalist - 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Finalist - Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
Finalist - 2023 Ontario Library Association Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Finalist and Honourable Mention - Canadian Law and Society Association Book Prize
Longlisted - 2023-2024 First Nations Communities Read
A heart-rending true story about racism and reconciliation
Divided by a beautiful valley and 150 years of racism, the town of Rossburn and the Waywayseecappo Indian reserve have been neighbours nearly as long as Canada has been a country. Their story reflects much of what has gone wrong with relations between Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians. It also offers, in the end, an uncommon measure of hope.
Valley of the Birdtail chronicles how two communities became separate and unequal--and what this means for the rest of us. In Rossburn, which was once settled by Ukrainian immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution, family income is near the national average and more than a third of adults have graduated from university. In Waywayseecappo, the average family lives below the national poverty line and less than a third of adults have graduated from high school, with many haunted by their time in residential schools.
This book follows multiple generations of two families, one white and one Indigenous, weaving their lives into the larger story of Canada. It is a story of villains and heroes, irony and idealism, racism and reconciliation. Valley of the Birdtail has the ambition to change the way we think about our past and light a path to a better future.
This Book Club is free, although pre-registration is required. Register online here.
