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There’s only one sure way to beat the February blahs, and you don’t have to dress in layers, or dress at all, to enjoy it. Snuggle up and crack open a good book.
During the final days of the Second World War, a farmer took pity on a starving 14-year-old boy and his older cousin, giving them a single egg to share.
The boys had slipped away from their German guards and were hiding in a hayloft when American soldiers convinced them it was safe to come out. It was May 8, 1945.
“The boy from the hayloft is now 94,” Bonny Reichert writes of her father, Saul.
When he boarded a ship to Canada in 1947, Saul was an orphan. His parents and five sisters were dead, and he and his cousin Abe had barely survived captivity in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He never wanted to see Poland again. But in 2015, after a relative discovered a family tomb in Warsaw, Saul returned with his wife and daughters.
An award-winning journalist, Bonny had always planned to write her father’s story. She did not plan to have a part of it, but in Warsaw, a perfect bowl of borscht showed her an unexpected way in. She began to explore her family’s history through food, tracing their culinary roots from Poland to the restaurants they ran in Edmonton when she was growing up and on to her own kitchen and her life as a chef, mother and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
A mystery buyer is determined to buy widow Jeannie Wolfert-Lang’s farm, and she’s just as determined to stay put, despite increasing pressure from her adult children and an over-aggressive Realtor. When that Realtor borrows Jeannie’s car and promptly dies in a crash, it looks like Jeannie was the intended victim. But who would literally kill to have her farm? And why?
With supporting characters including a trio of young tenant farmers, a cat named Diesel and a new acquaintance who claims to be a journalist, Jeannie is on her first case. Hopefully, the first of many.
After escaping an abusive arranged marriage with her two daughters, struggling to put herself through school and finding success in corporate Canada, bestselling author Samra Zafar (A Good Wife), still faced one tough enemy — herself. But she overcame the critical inner voice that was holding her back, and she’s here to tell you exactly how she did it, and how you can do it, too.
Between 1971 and 1985, a schoolteacher from B.C. moved to the Northwest Territories, where he charmed authorities and parents and sexually abused countless boys. Journalist Kathleen Lippa looks at how convicted perpetrator Ed Horne became “the darling of the … education department” while he wreaked havoc on Inuit communities, leaving a trail of generational trauma. A shameful history and a cautionary tale.