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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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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!).

Our August Author of the Month: EMMA DONOGHUE

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. She spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. Room sold more than two million copies and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean), as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Wonder was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue co-wrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix. The Pull of the Stars was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Her new book is Learned by Heart, a heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love at boarding school in nineteenth century York.

Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.

Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.

Our July Author of the Month: PATRICK DEWITT

Patrick deWitt is the author of the novels French Exit (a national bestseller), The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.

From this bestselling and award-winning author comes The Librarianist, the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humour, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.