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During a sweltering summer, Dills must come to terms with a horrific crime and the parent he loves who committed it. Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Wilkson behind. But it's impossible to really run from tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble. When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Wilkson Collegiate library when the shooter came in. But he won't talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can't. He definitely can't tell anyone that the Wilkson Shooter is his stepfather Jesse, that Jesse can speak into his mind from hundreds of kilometres away, and that Dills still loves him even though he committed an unspeakable crime.
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Chinelo—or Nelo, as her best friend, Kate, calls her—is all about her neighbourhood, Ginger East. She loves its chill vibe, its ride-or-die sense of community and the memories she has of growing up there. Ginger East isn’t what it used to be, though. After a deadly incident at the local arcade, most of Nelo’s friends, except for Kate, have moved away. But as long as the two girls have each other, Nelo’s good.
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Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.
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Mary Lawson’s beloved novels, Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, have delighted legions of readers around the world. The fictional, northern Ontario town of Struan, buried in the winter snows, is the vivid backdrop to her breathtaking new novel. Roads End brings us a family unravelling in the aftermath of tragedy: Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years held the family together but has finally broken free and gone to England, to try to make a life of her own.
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Things go from bad to worse as Shane’s dream of going to university is shattered and his grieving mother withdraws from the world. Worst of all, he and David have to hide their relationship from everyone. Shane feels that his only chance of a better life is moving to Toronto, but David refuses to join him. When yet another tragedy strikes, the two boys have to make difficult choices about their future together.
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Noah Thorpe goes to live with his father in George River, in Quebec's far north, for the school term, and finds that he will need to learn some lessons from some of his Inuit friends if he is to survive the harsh winter.
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A coming of age story set in historic and diverse Montreal, where a young Jewish boy dreams of a brighter future just as Jackie Robinson is making history with baseball's Montreal Royals.
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After surviving a shipwreck and losing his memory, Peter is introduced to David Thompson, a fur trader and famed explorer, who invites Peter to join him on what will be the adventure of a lifetime.
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It's winter in Montreal, 2002, when a graphic design student's gambling addiction starts to drag him under. In debt to the metal band that's commissioned him to draw their album cover and ensnared in lies to his friends and his cousin, he takes the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at La Trattoria, a high-end restaurant, where he finds himself thrust, on his first night, into roiling world of characters. A magnificent, hyperrealist debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden, The Dishwasher plunges us into a world in which--for better or for worse--everyone depends on each other.
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Starting in 1959, fifteen-year-old Algonquian Indian Nipishish deals with being kicked out of residential school, attending high school off the reservation, his love for Pinamen, and the previous death of his father.
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Cas Lowood, armed with his late father's mysterious athame, set out to kill a ghost known as Anna Dressed in Blood, but what he believes will be a routine task turns deadly when he discovers Anna is unlike any ghost he has ever encountered before.
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With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home.
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Fourteen-year-old Sam McLean, having started a new school and befriended classmate Cody "Maniac" Barnes who videotapes his crazy stunts for a blog, is involved in an accident in which Cody forces him to leave the side of a dying teenager, and, when he starts receiving mysterious messages about the night of the incident, Sam struggles with his guilty conscious and the fact that someone else knows what actually happened.
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Dot, whose name reflects her stature, has always had big dreams--she wants to be a dress designer like Mary Quant--but her dreams have to be put on hold while she searches for the truth about her parents. She gets a job as a seamstress at a lakeside resort in rural Ontario and falls hard for Eddie, a charming local boy who is equal parts helpful and distracting as Dot investigates her past.
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Dee is feeding the chickens the morning that bones are discovered on the mountain. Something doesn’t feel right - and her feeling is confirmed when local police show her a ring that they found with the bones, a ring belonging to Mary Ann Simpson, who disappeared four years earlier. Other girls, Dee learns, have gone missing from this small town nestled in the shadow of the Bruce Peninsula’s rugged escarpment, the ‘mountain’ that Dee loves. Like her grandmother, Dee has ‘the Sight’, an ability not only to see spirits from the afterlife but also to experience their earlier deaths - an experience that becomes more horrifying as events take darker turns. While trying to help with the investigation, Dee is drawn into a deepening mystery that soon strikes terrifyingly close to home.
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At cheerleading camp, Hermione is drugged and raped, but she is not sure whether it was one of her teammates or a boy on another team--and in the aftermath she has to deal with the rumors in her small Ontario town, the often awkward reaction of her classmates, the rejection of her boyfriend, the discovery that her best friend, Polly, is gay, and above all the need to remember what happened so that the guilty boy can be brought to justice.
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After a series of disastrous incidents, including a school suspension and a near-death experience, Zoe decides to liberate herself and her grandmother from their respective prisons taking them on an unforgettable journey to Toronto, where Zoe learns the truth about her uncle, and discovers strengths of her own that just might help her find a way back home.
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Fourteen-year-old Anneli, confused by her father's decision to leave their Mennonite community in Brazil, change their names, and try to locate her mother who disappeared when she was five, feels isolated in the big city of Toronto, and, as she tries to figure out the unspoken codes of high school, she searches for her mom and answers.
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Dashiel Woolf should be ecstatic for the chance to meet his hero, the Great Houdini, not long before the famous magician’s untimely death in 1926. But Dash is far more concerned about getting home—because home is 85 years in the future. Sent back in time through a magic trick gone terribly wrong, Dash and his new friend, Walt—a known troublemaker—hatch a plan to return Dash to the present day. But if they are successful, they might prevent the Great Houdini from taking part in the event that ended his life, possibly changing history forever . . .
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As crazy as her father’s plan sounds, sticking to it is easy for Harbour — until it isn’t. Fourteen-year-old Harbour is living in a tent in a Toronto ravine with her dog, a two-month supply of canned tuna, and an eccentric reading list.
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For Zack Thomson, life in the Nicholls Ward wasn't so bad. After his parents died, he developed strange allergies, and the mental institution was the only place where he could be properly looked after. As strange as it was, it was home. But that all changes the night a stranger on a Harley crashes through the front doors and tells him to run. Along with his best friend Charlie and a girl he may or may not be falling in love with, Zack does just that: run. Under the cover of night, hiding amongst the shadows, he races for the truth.
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The year is 1928. Seventeen-year-old Agnes ("Aggie") Maxwell leaves her native Scotland to pursue a new life in Canada, working as a domestic servant in Toronto. Her hopes are to get over the grief of her older brother's death and eventually rescue her family from their bleak existence of coal mining by bringing them to Canada. When she meets a Newfoundlander with his own secrets, Aggie faces a moment of reckoning where she must choose between her allegiance to her family in her home country and the possibility of a new life of her own.
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Wild Geese, the sequel to the Governor General's Award winning novel Greener Grass, follows Kit Byrne and her friend Mick O'Toole after they leave famine-stricken Ireland. Across the Atlantic, through Grosse Isle quarantine station, and on to Upper Canada, the two teenagers endure storms, epidemics, and quarantines. Kit is desperate to find the rest of her family who travelled on a different ship.
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At thirteen, Baby vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation: still young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase yet old enough to know more than she should about urban cruelties. Motherless, she lives with her father, Jules, who takes better care of his heroin habit than he does of his daughter. Baby's gift is a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. But her blossoming beauty has captured the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local pimp who runs an army of sad, slavishly devoted girls—a volatile situation even the normally oblivious Jules cannot ignore. And when an escape disguised as betrayal threatens to crush Baby's spirit, she will ultimately realize that the power of salvation rests in her hands alone.
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Jean Mason has a doppelganger. At least, that's what people tell her. Jean's curiosity quickly gets the better of her, and she visits the market, but sees no one who looks like her. The next day, she goes back to look again. With the aid of a small army of locals, she expands her surveillance. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants are eager to contribute to Jean's investigation. But when some of them start disappearing, it becomes apparent that her alleged double has a sinister agenda.
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Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education. And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father's mental illness; Sylvie, Bing's best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.
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Neighbors Polly, who wants to see a ghost, and Rose, who can't stop seeing ghosts, discover that their attic hideaways share a wall and soon they become good friends, and when the girls find a tombstone with Rose's name on it and encounter an angry spirit in her house, they become determined to solve the mystery.
Old Ontario by 
A Short History of Quebec by 
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by 
Toronto, A City Becoming by 
Map of Neighbourhood Historical Resources (Toronto): Click the neighbourhoods on the map to browse eBooks, pictures, and maps from each Toronto neighbourhood.
