Here are 100 books that The Imposter Bride fans have personally recommended if you like
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I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This is a sweeping saga, the kind I love because it keeps me turning pages.
Against a backdrop of 20th-century China, I was drawn into the fate of a cast of captivating characters. Split into two locales and timelines—Vancouver in 1991 and China from the mid-20th century to the tragedy in1989—the novel is a jigsaw puzzle of countless bits, revealed with skill and delicacy as the pieces finally fit together.
Here is the Cultural Revolution; there Tiananmen Square and in between I was caught up in the lives so cruelly marked by history.
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I don’t know how much of who we are is determined by genetics, and how much is from the environment, but I enjoy using characters and stories to explore the question. My scientific and medical background allows me to pull from my training, clinical patients, and scientific studies to create stories that explore characters who are at the precipice of a problem and need to fight against their inner beliefs to learn who they truly are. It’s like a chess game, moving the pieces around the board to see which side will win!
This novel took much of America by storm, and I am no different.
I love the voice of Demon Copperhead, which bleeds from the Appalachian Mountains. He has endured more trauma over his early years than most people do in several lifetimes. I think what’s most endearing about this novel is that it is sadly believable. Demon is a boy whose local environment has doomed him before he took his first breath. He’s the kind of boy who is just hoping for a break, and as the reader, all I wanted to do was adopt him and give him a good home.
And of course, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that probably means something!
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This is a masterpiece of storytelling that paints scenes with a featherlight touch.
With an economy of words I greatly admire, Kim Thúy’s semi-autobiography reveals a rich story about a young girl’s escape from war-torn Vietnam. Ru explores the hardships of being a refugee, one who must grapple with finding her identity in a foreign culture.
I love the lyricism and Thúy's ability to conjure a scene through small, haunting vignettes.
Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
Since my 40s, I have been plagued by the question: Who packed the suitcase we carry all our lives? My mother never stopped talking about her Holocaust experience, but I didn’t want to hear it. I lost my parents before I was 30 and eventually began to wonder why I hadn’t asked more questions when I could. We are shaped as much by the stories we are not told as by those selected for us to hear. I began to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother who never spoke about her experiences and the secrets that get locked into the suitcase I might carry.
I was drawn into this novel, easily relating to the protagonists who, at the core of this story, suffer from a crisis of identity. It arises from feeling uncomfortable in your own skin because you don’t know where—or who—you come from.
I related to the immigrant experience, to being the other, a displaced person, and to the conflicting desires: wanting to blend in while maintaining an individualistic identity.
A story of identity, connection and forgiveness, A Convergence of Solitudes shares the lives of two families across Partition of India, Operation Babylift in Vietnam, and two referendums in Quebec.
Sunil and Hima, teenage lovers, bravely defy taboos in pre-Partition India to come together as their country divides in two. They move across the world to Montreal and raise a family, but Sunil shows symptoms of schizophrenia, shattering their newfound peace. As a teenager, their daughter Rani becomes obsessed with Quebecois supergroup Sensibilité―and, in particular, the band's charismatic, nationalistic frontman, Serge Giglio―whose music connects Rani to the province's struggle for…
Since my 40s, I have been plagued by the question: Who packed the suitcase we carry all our lives? My mother never stopped talking about her Holocaust experience, but I didn’t want to hear it. I lost my parents before I was 30 and eventually began to wonder why I hadn’t asked more questions when I could. We are shaped as much by the stories we are not told as by those selected for us to hear. I began to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother who never spoke about her experiences and the secrets that get locked into the suitcase I might carry.
It is compelling how Correa’s novel spans the difficult history of the 20th century as recounted through the stories of three generations of women. What absorbed me most was the lengths to which the mothers in the novel go to protect their daughters, but how family secrets invariably play out to create a cascade of consequences.
Berlin, 1931: Ally Keller, a talented young poet, is alone and scared when she gives birth to a mixed-race daughter she names Lilith. As the Nazis rise to power, Ally knows she must keep her baby in the shadows to protect her against Hitler's deadly ideology of Aryan purity. But as she grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Lilith hidden so Ally sets in motion a dangerous and desperate plan to send her daughter across the ocean to safety.
Havana, 1958: Now an adult, Lilith has few memories of her mother or her childhood in Germany. Besides,…
Since my 40s, I have been plagued by the question: Who packed the suitcase we carry all our lives? My mother never stopped talking about her Holocaust experience, but I didn’t want to hear it. I lost my parents before I was 30 and eventually began to wonder why I hadn’t asked more questions when I could. We are shaped as much by the stories we are not told as by those selected for us to hear. I began to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother who never spoke about her experiences and the secrets that get locked into the suitcase I might carry.
I cherish this semi-autobiographical book because it spoke to my own experience growing up with parents who were Holocaust survivors. It assured me that I was not alone in my need to weave and duck the crazy emotional punches of parents who had experienced unimaginable loss and grief in their lives.
What also recommended this story to me was how Pilcer believed in telling it like it is, yet never ceased to find the humor in situations. Hers was a kind of rebellion to authority I experienced in my life and what shaped who I am.
Wearing a tight black skirt, roach- killer boots, and teased hair, Zosha runs with her junior high school's fast crowd, circa 1960. For Zosha, life is about fitting in, stepping out, making it with the handsome Puerto Rican boy in the local movie theater. But for Zosha's parents, life is about how they survived when everyone around them died during the Holocaust. Now their daughter--born in a German DP camp and raised in New York City--must find her own way to survive.
With unique emotional honesty, Sonia Pilcer illuminates Zosha's journey through the terra incognita of life as a “2G”--…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
With irresistible sly humor, a sharp eye for character, and a belief that stories can save us, Mikhail Iossel led me on a merry chase.
In his collection of 20 short stories, he paints a bitingly funny, deeply disturbing picture of a tough Soviet childhood and what it means to grow up Jewish in Leningrad. I recognized that the challenges of those early Soviet years prepared him for the immigrant experience of coming to America.
These stories are true to the Russian nature that wildly vacillates between comedy and tragedy. I loved this collection, which held me in thrall until I finished reading in record time.
Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience
"We can't stop turning the pages of this book." -Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review
From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons.
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
Freedman explores all the themes I love and write about in my own work: long-buried family secrets, inherited trauma, and the lasting effects of being displaced.
I related to the protagonist’s search for identity while uncovering her family secrets, something I only began doing in my late 40s. To my surprise, I discovered I was not alone. And that is why we read: to know we are not alone.
Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year. In the process of cleaning out her grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can't trust, a village in Hungary and an artist's loft in Harlem. A coming-of-age story about…
I love it when a writer breaks the rules of a genre like fiction, nonfiction, or poetry to tell a story that can’t be contained in a typical way. Here are five books that think outside the box to narrate a tale that wants to be told in its own fashion.
André Breton’s book is a patchwork of literary forms, crazy-quilted together to form an amazing image of the world during World War II. At that time, Breton was in exile from Nazi-occupied France, and he visited Quebec in Canada to experience again the comfort and familiarity of being in a French-speaking land.
The book is part poetry and part prose, sometimes a journal, at other times a political meditation, and then a series of stories from mythology and the mystic Tarot. Breton’s ultimate take on living through a world war for the second time is that our daily existence needs to be re-impassioned to prevent violence from becoming the alternative to the mundane. I was fortunate to translate this classic from French to English.
André Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Percé Rock-its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty-as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. In the 17th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, a naked woman beneath a sky of stars pours water from two urns into water and…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
Growing up on a farm in Southwestern Ontario, Canada that my family had owned for six generations, my world was small. That all changed when I moved to Toronto and met my husband, the Canadian-born son of Polish Jews who survived death camps and the Holocaust. His family taught me what it means to find yourself in the crosshairs of history, to be forced to make impossible choices under dire circumstances. I’m passionate about sharing stories that build understanding and celebrating those forced by fate to be fighters — their strong yet often surprising personalities, their unique journeys, and their inspiring grit.
I love the genesis of this book — a high school writing workshop for newcomers to Quebec, Canada. And I love that within its pages, students from around the world — the Philippines, Uruguay, Pakistan, China, Moldova Iran, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Venezuela — come together to share their personal experiences of seeking peace and security in a new country. Students share the pain and loss of being forced to leave their homes, families, friends, and way of life behind and reflect on their changing identities with strength and vulnerability. Illustrated with expressive portraits by Rogè, the collection powerfully conveys the uncertainty these young immigrants face and the cautious hope they have for the future.
A moving #OwnVoices poetry collection written by young newcomers to Canada Carry On began in a high school in Outremont, Quebec, where author and poet Simon Boulerice conducted creative-writing workshops for young newcomers to Canada. As the students began writing, their poems gave voice to their reflections on leaving family, friends, and countries of origin to make new homes and connections in their new home, Canada. Paired with expressive portraits by award-winning artist Rogé, each young writer reflects on the experience of leaving one home for another. The collection of poems express feelings of anxiety, sorrow, anticipation, gratitude, and hope…
