A "Beach Read" is Just a Book at the Beach!
We have teamed up with the LPG to highlight some Canadian and local authors that we think are great beach reads! The term "beach read" encompasses all sorts of different books and we believe a beach read is just a book you read at the beach! Happy Summer!
About LPG
The Literary Press Group of Canada (LPG) is a not-for-profit association of Canadian literary book publishers. With a current membership of about sixty Canadian-owned and -operated publishing houses, the LPG's mandate is to support the growth of Canadian literary culture.
The LPG boasts 64 members from coast to coast publishing award-winning and beach-ready fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and kids.
Read more about LPG here.
Six Ostriches
- Philipp Schott 
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"Combines the soothing sleuthing of Murder, She Wrote with the humble charm of All Creatures Great and Small." -- Publishers Weekly STARRED review For readers of The Thursday Murder Club comes a lighthearted mystery with an incredible sense of place It's springtime in rural Manitoba, and the snow has finally left the exotic animal farm when an ostrich finds and swallows a shiny object. (Because this is what ostriches do.) Cue veterinarian and amateur sleuth Dr. Peter Bannerman, who surgically removes the object, which looks like an ancient Viking artifact. Soon after, people around are horrified by a series of animal mutilations. This sets Peter, and his talented sniffer dog, Pippin, on the hunt for answers. Peter begins to suspect a link between the Viking artifact, the mutilations, and a shadowy group of white supremacists on the internet. Before long Peter and Pippin are in over their heads, and the only way for them to get out alive will be to unmask the mastermind before they end up among their victims.
Burr
- Brooke Lockyer
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A '90s-era Southern Ontario Gothic about holding on to the dead, voiced with plaintive urgency and macabre sensuality. In the small town of Burr, Ontario, thirteen-year-old Jane yearns to reunite with her recently deceased father and fantasizes about tunnelling through the earth to his coffin. This leads her to bond with local eccentric Ernest, who is still reeling from the long-ago drowning of his little sister. Jane's mother, Meredith, escapes into wildness, enacting the past on the abandoned bed that she finds in the middle of the forest, until her daughter's disappearance spurs her into action. The voice of the town conveys the suspicions and subliminal fears of a rural community--a chorus of whispers that reaches a fever pitch when Jane and Ernest disappear from Burr together. Throughout, the novel is haunted by Henry, a former wrestler who once stood on his bed in the middle of the night, holding up the weight of the ceiling in his sleeping hands. Mixing realism and the fantastic, Brooke Lockyer's debut novel investigates the nature of grief and longing that reach beyond the grave.
Critical Fictions
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Critical Fictions contains essays and other writing about five contemporary artists living and working in Canada. Although quite distinct, there are threads and sympathies between them. All are Canadian, each works with abstraction, the body is central, they probe structures of power and control with wit and pathos, and each is queer. Their subversion, humour, slipperiness, and fluidity are rooted in their queerness, making them intimate bedfellows. Their work is brilliantly critical, tenderly gorgeous, and delightfully acerbic. Many of Hannah?s responses didn?t fit in a conventional essay form: memories, images, poems, stories, and weird tangents bubbled up. These interdisciplinary texts, mostly placed after each essay, respond to the analysis, the art, and the experience of writing with these artists? work.
Gordie's Skate
- Bill Waiser ,
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Set in Saskatchewan during the Great Depression, this is the story of hockey legend Gordie Howe and his first experience with skating. The book is charmingly illustrated in full colour by Leanne Franson. Bill Waiser is a popular historian and Governor-General?s-Award-winning author. Times were hard for five-year-old Gordie and his family in the 1930s. One day, a neighbour, desperate for some money, sold Mrs. Howe a bag of meager possessions. Inside was something wonderful: an old pair of men?s hockey skates. Even though they were several sizes too large, Gordie and his sister pounced on them. At first, she and Gordie tried skating on just one foot? then holding hands to keep their balance. Eventually, his sister abandoned her skate, and Gordie grabbed it. He never looked back! Gordie?s Skate is an ode to the love of hockey and a tale about hard times, where a family makes do with what little they had, even eating oatmeal for lunch and supper. It?s also a story about kids creating their own fun, with determination?Gordie and his friends played for hours with little or no equipment. This inspirational picture book shows how people came to depend on one another to endure the Great Depression. Gordie Howe?s long and celebrated NHL career owed much to his mother?s willingness to help a neighbour. Lively illustrations capture life in Saskatoon in the 1930s, and show how a pair of old skates helped Gordie build skill and confidence and achieve his dreams.
Hold Your Tongue
- Matthew Ttreault
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Upon learning his great-uncle Alfred has suffered a stroke, Richard sets out for Ste. Anne, in southeastern Manitoba, to find his father and tell him the news. Waylaid by memories of his stalled romance, tales of run-ins with local Mennonites, his job working a honey wagon, and struck by visions of Métis history and secrets of his family's past, Richard confronts his desires to leave town, even as he learns to embrace his heritage.
Evoking an oral storytelling epic that weaves together one family's complex history, Hold Your Tongueasks what it means to be Métis and francophone. Recalling the work of Katherena Vermette and Joshua Whitehead, Matthew Tétreault's debut novel shines with a poignant, but playful character-driven meditation on the struggles of holding onto "la langue," and marks the emergence of an important new voice.
Homebodies
- Amy LeBlanc
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"LeBlanc surprises and disturbs, to the reader's intense anguish - in this collection's case, a good thing." - Winnipeg Free Press
"Original, inherently fascinating, and with a narrative storytelling style that is ideal for Gothic fiction and the short story format. . . a highly recommended pick." - Midwest Book Review
Homebodies is an uncanny and ghostly debut with stories that provoke dread, abjection, and horror. The tales are intertwined and linked like a chain of dried daisies or butterfly legs: someone you used to know is on trial for murder. You work at a funeral home. Your dead grandmother calls you on the phone. You pin and preserve butterflies on a corkboard as a strange girl knocks on your door. You put a bike lock on the fridge. You sleepwalk. You attend a party. You get sick. You get an IV infusion. You don't get better.
The stories in Homebodies show that you don't need a house to be haunted - the body can do that all on its own.
Leaving Wisdom
- Sharon Butala
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Sharon Butala's new novel begins with the wrong kind of bang when retiring social worker Judith falls on the ice on the way to her retirement party. The debilitating concussion that follows seems to shake loose a confusing whirl of memories. Judith is a mother of four, and her relationships with her daughters are complicated. They all seem to have men trouble, except for the wild daughter who seems to have settled down, inexplicably to Judith, in Jerusalem. With her ears still ringing and her strength compromised by a shaky recovery, Judith leaves Calgary and, to everyone's bewilderment, moves back to the town near the family farm. In Wisdom, Saskatchewan, she confronts many unanswered questions: Why was her father, a World War Two vet, so troubled? What are her brother and sister hiding from her? As she pursues answers to unsolved mysteries in her own life, more complicated and wider ranging questions arise. Living in a small town is a shock after the anonymity of a big city. Judith finds herself exposed to watchful neighbours, and she is watchful in turn, seeing things that are mystifying at first -- and then alarming. Small town bigotry and what looks like a serious crime unfolding in the house next door make her return even more difficult -- what is she doing here? Does she have enough wisdom to unravel her past? Does she have a future in a place where she is not exactly welcome? This thought-provoking and very readable tale shows not only the suffering that comes from family secrets, but also unfolds one woman?s late life awakening to the complex shadows cast by World War Two and the Holocaust.
Livingsky
- Anthony Bidulka
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Going home is not always the best answer. Forced to leave behind her big city dreams, Merry Bell returns to Livingsky Saskatchewan to start over. Living with plenty of secrets, but no money, friends, or place to live during a prairie winter-all while trying to start her own PI business-proves to be more challenging than she imagined. With a first case that quickly turns more dangerous than it first appeared, Merry must deal with a dodgy client, the murder of the surgeon who performed her gender affirming surgery, and more than one mysterious stranger.
For the first time since his award-winning Russell Quant novels, Bidulka begins a new mystery series, continuing in his tradition of presenting under-represented characters and settings that immediately feel familiar and beloved, while tugging at heart strings and tickling your funny bone. Livingsky easily matches the beauty and tenderness of Going to Beautiful while delivering a page-turning mystery.
The Mystery of the Painted Fan
- Linda Trinh , Clayton Nguyen
Children's paperback
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The third book in the early chapter book series The Nguyen Kids features the youngest sibling, Jacob, and continues the series' exploration of social justice themes, specifically gender expression and identity, with a supernatural twist.
BOOK 3: THE MYSTERY OF THE PAINTED FAN
Excerpt:
When I shut the door, I hold my painted fan. I breathe in and out. I wonder . . . will Grandma Noi help me?
Thoughtful and creative, Jacob is tired of being the baby of the family. He is ready to fully express himself in all of the ways that feel right to him, but not everyone seems as eager to accept change--even his own parents. He still loves hockey, yet he also wants to try something new, even if others may not understand. Confused and frustrated, Jacob turns to the beautiful fan his Grandma Noi gave him, which features all of the Vietnamese zodiac animals. With the mysterious fan and memories of Grandma guiding him, Jacob finds the power to remain true to himself, and show his family who he could be.
Places Like These
- Lauren Carter
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A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend's tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend's secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter's poignant short stories reflects each character's journey.
Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human--love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.
Reckoning
- Patrick Friesen
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Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song.
Here is a master poet taking stock in later years. Adrift and grounded, lost in memories that are alive in the present and also lost to history, the artist's mind cannot help but speculate and wonder about the navigation of it all. How does one chart the course? How did one chart the course? And what was discovered along the way? Joy, awe, grief, loss, wonder . . . "disappearing into the mind of the dream, / that opening," and now all rolled into one ball of what, wisdom?
"what was my early life, banging away at that padlocked gate?
. . .
is this where
the return begins? starting over in old age, body
falling apart according to plan, and no blossoming
wisdom, kneeling on the muddy riverbank, thirsty
once again for mind,
. . .
and when
the brain falters the stories skew once more into
something unfamiliar, something from long before
you, and those pieces won't be put together again,
not ever, will they?"
What connects us with the past? Memory and story. Each fragment a part of the whole. Without it we exist in isolation. Friesen's deep and careful observations make Reckoning both intensely personal and universal.
Remedies For Chiron
- m patchwork monoceros
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In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
A Safe Girl to Love
- Casey Plett
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A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett. By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman:eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable. A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.
The Stars of Mount Quixx
- S M Beiko
Young adult softcover
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Even the best intentions can bring down a mountain ... Sent away for the summer, the Ivyweather sisters were promised a family vacation by their wealthy, indifferent parents. Two at-odds opposites -- Constance an anxious society sweetheart and Ivory an adventure-struck rebel -- the sisters aren't sure what to make of the dangerously decayed town of Quixx and its creeping fog that never seems to lift. When Ivory disappears after a spat with her sister, Constance tracks her to the mountain, where the Ivyweathers learn the town's hushed talk of monsters is more than just a rumor. There, the sisters meet Derrek, a dapper and talented astronomer who also happens to be a spider-like creature with a scientific mind, the best of intentions, and a tragic past. Together, they all must find a way to lift the dangerous fog that has ensnared the town and return Quixx's long-lost stars. But they soon discover that something far more monstrous than beasts lurks in Quixx, and it's poised to crush this sleepy mountain town, along with the dreams of those in it. Death and discarded memories haunt every corner of Quixx, but kinship, romance, and family -- the one we choose -- are at the heart of this cautiously optimistic, unabashedly queer modern monster story. About the Series Welcome to Brindlewatch -- a world like ours from days gone by. Fast shiny cars, growing metropolises, and a war on the other side of the ocean with an enemy no one can see. Back at home, monsters, spirits, and the humans who get entangled with them populate the pages of the Brindlewatch Quintet -- five individual, interconnected tales of mystery, romance, and ultimately, belonging. This is the newest YA fantasy series by beloved writer S.M. Beiko, award-winning author of the Realms of Ancient trilogy. It is notable for its charming and quirky tone and diverse cast of relatable characters. The series will begin with The Stars of Mount Quixx in spring 2023 and conclude with The Battle for Brindlewatch in 2027.
Suite as Sugar
- Camille Hernndez-Ramdwar
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Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.
From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto's condo culture, from Havana's haunted streets to Trinidad's calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands.
Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
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