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The spoon stealer / by Crewe, Lesley,1955-author.;
"Born into a basket of clean sheets -- ruining a perfectly good load of laundry -- Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don't know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime -- from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer. When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave, to see what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right, too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful -- perhaps several spoonfuls -- of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy. The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women's friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Domestic fiction.; Families; Family secrets; Homecoming; Human-animal relationships; Inheritance and succession;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Outdoor kids in an inside world : getting your family out of the house and radically engaged with nature / by Rinella, Steven,author.; Johnson, Kelsey,illustrator.;
"The average American spends ninety percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Today, kids can spend up to seven hours per day looking at screens. Not only does this phenomenon have consequences for our kids' physical and mental health, it calls into question their ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment. We can talk about environmental stewardship, but until more people make meaningful contact with nature, the welfare of our planet is in jeopardy. Thankfully, with the right mindset, families can find beauty, meaning, and connection in a life lived outdoors. Now, outdoors expert Steven Rinella shares the parenting wisdom he has garnered as a father whose family has lived amid the biggest cities and wildest corners of America. Throughout, he offers practical advice for getting your kids radically engaged with nature in a muddy, thrilling, hands-on way, guided by black-and-white illustrations throughout-with the ultimate goal of helping them see their own place within the natural ecosystem. No matter their location-rural, suburban, or urban-caregivers and kids will bond over activities such as: Camping to conquer fears, build tolerance for dirt and discomfort, and savor the timeless pleasure of swapping stories around a campfire. Growing a vegetable garden to develop a capacity to nurture and an appreciation for hard work. Foraging for wild berries, nuts, and mushrooms as a way to experience the delight of discovery. Fishing local lakes and rivers to learn the value of patience while grappling with the possibility of failure. Cooking together with naturally sourced ingredients you procured. Hunting for sustainably managed wild game to face the realities of life, death, and what it really takes to obtain our food"--
Subjects: Environmentalism.; Natural history.; Nature; Outdoor life.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Good morning, monster : five heroic journeys to recovery / by Gildiner, Catherine,1948-author.;
"Catherine Gildiner is a bestselling memoirist, a novelist, and a psychologist who practiced privately for 25 years. This book focuses on five brave men and women who overcame enormous trauma--in her view, heroes who should be celebrated. With a novelist's storytelling gift, Gildiner recounts the details of her patients' struggles and their paths to recovery and weaves in her own tale of her growth as a psychologist. In therapy, patients have to become vulnerable by stripping away their defenses, but so do therapists, who cannot hide behind a title, a desk, or even their specialized knowledge. The five cases described include a successful but lonely musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman who, at the age of eight, had looked after her two siblings after her father, likely a murderer, abandoned them in a rural cottage; a glamorous workaholic whose wealthy, hideously negligent mother had greeted her each morning with "Good Morning, Monster"; an indigenous man who'd suffered greatly at a residential school; and a young woman whose abuse at the hands of her father led to a severe personality disorder. Each patient presents a mystery at first, one that will only be unpacked over years. They arrive, sometimes unwillingly, to try to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering is an entirely different matter. It will take courage to face those realities, and it requires creativity and resourcefulness from their therapist. Each patient embodies the virtues of self-reflection, stoicism, perseverance, and forgiveness as they confront the real source of their problems and work unflinchingly to face the truth. Gildiner's account of her journeys with them is moving and insightful and sometimes humorous. It offers a behind-the-scenes look into the therapist's office and explains how the process can heal even the most unimagineable wounds."--
Subjects: Psychotherapy.; Psychotherapy; Psychologists.; Psychologists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Bob Dylan : things have changed : a sort of biography / by Rosenbaum, Ron,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A spellbinding, passionate, and unprecedented deep dive into the ever-changing but ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter, from his rural Minnesota upbringing through his sofa-surfing days in Greenwich Village through his many tumultuous conversions -- to electric guitars and country music and Christianity and on ... Renowned culture critic Ron Rosenbaum discovered not only the world-changing music of early Bob Dylan, but the man himself, in the 1960s, when Rosenbaum was a young journalist living in Greenwich Village just around the corner from Dylan, and working for the legendary alt-weekly, The Village Voice. Rosenbaum, in fact, became the Voice's de facto Dylan reporter. It was the time, and the place, where an essential idea of Dylan's character was formed -- that of the whip-smart, angry, too-cool-for-school icon, a kind of James Dean in denim. The raspy voice, not to mention the brilliantly cutting lyricism, only somehow added to his cultural dangerousness. The Dylan, in other words, recently portrayed in the hit movie A Complete Unknown. But Dylan has had many changes of character since then. There was the smoother-voiced country crooner of Nashville Skyline; the white-faced ringmaster of the Rolling Thunder Review; the enraged proselytizer who saw Jesus in a Tucson motel room and converted to Christianity ... and more. And throughout, the famously recalcitrant Dylan would tell people, "I'm not that person anymore," whatever previous character he was asked about. In a probing and personal literary appreciation, Rosenbaum examines what Dylan nonetheless revealed about himself in his lyrics and writings, and his infrequent interviews. Rosenbaum, in fact, was one of the few to interview Dylan in those years, and may own the record for longest interview, sitting down for ten days with Dylan for a Playboy interview in 1978"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Dylan, Bob, 1941-; Composers; Lyricists; Rock musicians; Singers;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Be useful : seven tools for life / by Schwarzenegger, Arnold,author.;
"The seven rules to follow to realize your true purpose in life--distilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own journey of ceaseless reinvention and extraordinary achievement, and available for absolutely anyone. The world's greatest bodybuilder. The world's highest paid movie star. The leader of the world's sixth largest economy. That these are the same person sounds like the setup to a joke. But this is no joke. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this did not happen by accident. Arnold's stratospheric success happened as part of a process. As the result of clear vision, big thinking, hard work, direct communication, resilient problem-solving, open-minded curiosity, and a commitment to giving back. All of it guided by the one lesson Arnold's father hammered into him above all: be useful. As Arnold conquered every realm he entered, he kept his father's adage close to his heart. Written with his uniquely earnest, blunt, powerful voice, Be Useful takes readers on an inspirational tour through Arnold's toolkit for a meaningful life. Arnold shows us how to put those tools to work, in service of whatever fulfilling future we can dream up for ourselves. He brings his insights to vivid life with compelling personal stories, life-changing successes and life-threatening failures alike--some of them famous, some told here for the first time ever. Too many of us struggle to disconnect from our self-pity and connect to our purpose. At an early age, Arnold forged the mental tools to build the ladder out of the poverty and narrow-mindedness of his rural Austrian hometown, tools he used to add rung after rung from there. Now he has shared that wisdom with all of us. As he puts it, no one is going to come rescue you-you only have yourself. The good news, it turns out, is that you are all you need"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Schwarzenegger, Arnold.; Resilience (Personality trait); Self-actualization (Psychology); Success.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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A house in the sky : a memoir / by Lindhout, Amanda.; Corbett, Sara.;
Includes bibliographical references."The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace.At the age of eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the big city--Calgary--and worked as a cocktail waitress, saving her tips so she could travel the globe. As a child, she escaped a violent household by paging through National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. Now she would see those places for real. She backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each experience, went on to travel solo across Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a TV reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia--"the most dangerous place on earth"--to report on the fighting there. On her fourth day in the country, she and her photojournalist companion were abducted. An astoundingly intimate and harrowing account of Lindhout's fifteen months as a captive, A House in the Sky illuminates the psychology, motivations, and desperate extremism of her young guards and the men in charge of them. She is kept in chains, nearly starved, and subjected to unthinkable abuse. She survives by imagining herself in a "house in the sky," looking down at the woman shackled below, and finding strength and hope in the power of her own mind. Lindhout's decision, upon her release, to counter the violence she endured by founding an organization to help the Somali people rebuild their country through education is a wrenching testament to the capacity of the human spirit and an astonishing portrait of the power of compassion and forgiveness"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Lindhout, Amanda.; Hostages; Journalists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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The Sirens A Novel [electronic resource] : by Hart, Emilia.aut; CloudLibrary;
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • #1 LibraryReads Pick • Indie Next Pick A spellbinding novel about sisters separated by centuries, but bound together by the sea, from the author of the runaway New York Times bestseller Weyward 2019: Lucy awakens from a dream to find her hands around her ex-lover’s throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister’s house on the Australian coast, hoping she can help explain the strangely vivid nightmare that preceded the attack—but Jess is nowhere to be found. As Lucy awaits her return, the rumors surrounding Jess’s strange small town start to emerge. Numerous men have gone missing at sea, spread over decades. A tiny baby was found hidden in a cave. And sailors tell of hearing women’s voices on the waves. Desperate for answers, Lucy finds and begins to read her sister’s adolescent diary. 1999: Jess is a lonely sixteen-year-old in a rural town in the middle of the continent. Diagnosed with a rare allergy to water, she has always felt different, until her young, charming art teacher takes an interest in her drawings, seeing a power and maturity in them—and in her—that no one else has. 1800: Twin sisters Mary and Eliza have been torn from their loving father in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship bound for Australia. For their entire lives, they’ve feared the ocean, as their mother tragically drowned when they were just girls. Yet as the boat bears them further and further from all they know, they begin to notice changes in their bodies that they can’t explain, and they feel the sea beginning to call to them… A breathtaking tale of female resilience and the bonds of sisterhood across time and space, The Sirens captures the power of dreams, and the mystery and magic of the sea.General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Historical; Contemporary Women;
© 2025., St. Martin's Publishing Group,
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Finding Freedom : a cook's story : remaking a life from scratch / by French, Erin(Chef),author.;
"Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad's diner and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th century mill. This singular memoir-a classic American story-invites readers to Erin's corner of her beloved Maine to share the real person behind the "girl from Freedom" fairytale, and the not-so-picture-perfect struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and that make Erin's life triumphant. In Finding Freedom, Erin opens up to the challenges, stumbles, and victories that have led her to the exact place she was ever meant to be, telling stories of multiple rock-bottoms, of darkness and anxiety, of survival as a jobless single mother, of pills that promised release but delivered addiction, of a man who seemed to offer salvation but in the end ripped away her very sense of self. And of the beautiful son who was her guiding light as she slowly rebuilt her personal and culinary life around the solace she found in food-as a source of comfort, a sense of place, as a way of bringing goodness into the world. Erin's experiences with deep loss and abiding hope, told with both honesty and humor, will resonate with women everywhere who are determined to find their voices, create community, grow stronger and discover their best-selves despite seemingly impossible odds. Set against the backdrop of rural Maine and its lushly intense, bountiful seasons, Erin reveals the passion and courage needed to invent oneself anew, and the poignant, timeless connections between food and generosity, renewal and freedom"--
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Biographies.; French, Erin.; Women cooks; Cooks;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Open, Heaven [electronic resource] : by Hewitt, Seán.aut; CloudLibrary;
Named a Most Anticipated Release of 2025 by Vulture, Literary Hub, the BBC and RTÉ A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening. Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives. James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community in which he has grown up. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic and troubled. Underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life. Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Literary; Coming of Age; Gay;
© 2025., Knopf Canada,
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Daughters of Shandong / by Chung, Eve J.,author.;
"A propulsive, extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters' harrowing escape to Taiwan as the Communist revolution sweeps through China, by debut author Eve J. Chung, based on her family story. Daughters are the Ang family's curse. In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother-abused by the family for failing to birth a boy-finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the Communist army closes in on their town, the rest of the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they view them as useless mouths to feed. Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family's crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing the worst is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless but resourceful, they forge travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them. From the countryside to the bustling city of Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing tide of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they've known also comes new freedom-to take hold of their fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story. Told in assured, evocative prose, with impeccably drawn characters, Daughters of Shandong is a hopeful, powerful story about the resilience of women in war; the enduring love between mothers, daughters, and sisters; and the sacrifices made to lift up future generations"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Mothers and daughters; Patriarchy; Rich people; Sisters; Torture; War victims; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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