Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea

Ten-year-old Elly Verkest is a first-generation Canadian born after the Second World War.  Her father, Gaston, is Belgian and her mother, Mina, is Dutch.  Growing up in Southern Ontario, in a small town filled with Dutch and Belgians, she is carving out her own unique Canadian identity. Her father raises pigeons and often travels back to Belgium for business.  But he doesn’t return from one of his trips.  As Elly and Mina struggle to build a new life without him, their relationship becomes strained and they grow apart.  As a young adult, Elly decides to travel to Belgium in search of her father, and is shocked at what she discovers.   Elly returns to Canada, pregnant by a man she met while in Antwerp.  When her daughter Linda is grown up, she develops a close relationship with Mina, much to the dismay of her mother.  And as this relationship develops, the family secrets spill out. Fire and Air , by Erik Vlaminck and translated by Pa...

In war-torn Chechnya, Akhmed finds his neighbour's eight-year-old daughter Havaa hiding in the snowy woods after the Feds kidnapped her father and burned down their house.  Knowing that the Feds will be looking for her and that it's unsafe for him to care for her, he takes her to the only place he can think of - the abandoned hospital where one doctor remains. Sonja Andreyevana is barely keeping it together.  As the only doctor in the hospital, she spends most of her time amputating limbs.  When Akhmed arrives at the hospital with the young girl in tow, she protests that she cannot take her in.  But when Akhmed, a trained doctor, offers to help at the hospital in exchange for the girls safety, she cannot refuse. Over the course of five days, Sonja, Akhmed, and others will discover how their lives have intersected over the course of a decade permeated by war and its repercussions.  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra is an incredible ...