a virtual meeting in september

“What comes through most strikingly in Warren’s narrative is Estella’s frustration at her circumstances. From childhood she believes Oliver when he tells her she will inherit the brick plant. Until the day he reveals he was just humouring her and of course it will be her brothers who will take over when he eventually retires. Estella’s reward is instead the responsibility of playing nursemaid for him in his dotage. This pattern carries on throughout her life, and we ache for the wasted potential, the opportunities just out of reach. At the same time we cheer her small rebellions – taking lovers, buying a flashy car, and proving herself an astute business woman after all.”

— quill and quire

the summer drags on and while a lot has changed; so much remains the same. we hope that news of a virtual book club gathering will be something to look forward to.

on monday september 21, dianne warren will join us from her home in regina to talk to us about her latest book, the diamond house. we will pick up dinner (with the ingredients for a cocktail as well) from public kitchen that afternoon then settle in for a reading and a chat with dianne on zoom.

we heard your suggestions about our last meeting and have some suggestions for a better zoom experience. first, we encourage you to submit your questions via the “chat” button in zoom. you can do this at the beginning of the meeting or as the questions come to you. all will be read by the moderator and dianne and, time-permitting, all should be answered.

we also encourage you to set up your own “mini book club” in your backyard with a few friends. that way you encourage a safe gathering with friends and maybe even carry on the discussion after the zoom meeting ends.

“Estella grows up planning her future in the image of her father’s daring first wife, rather than that of her traditional mother. When her plans are derailed again and again by the family patriarchy, she longs to rebel and be like Salina. Unable to openly challenge her father, and with a chorus of sisters-in-law passing judgment, she does the right thing instead, and plays the role of the good daughter.

Until she doesn’t.”

— CBC books

a chance to go OUT (at least virtually)

“At a nadir, King’s narrator stops in a bookstore on her way to work and browses through William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible. She notes, “The writing has that stark lucidity of someone trying to tell you the truest thing they know.”

That isn’t exactly King’s achievement in this novel. Writers & Lovers is too generously infused with heart and soul and wit and wisdom to be called stark.”

— NPR.org review

“Now on her fifth novel, King has a lifetime of experience with the pressures and absurdities of being an aspiring writer — and a successful one. She’s also in a position to cast a knowing, satiric eye across the whole enterprise of fiction workshops, graduate seminars, bookstore readings and publishing parties. Casey endures the condescension of insecure, egotistical men who “wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.” Such acerbic insights ensure that “Writers & Lovers” isn’t just a novel for other writers. It explores a culture determined to shame young women’s sexuality, hobble their motivation and mock their ambition.”

— washington post review

well, not exactly “out” but, on tuesday june 9, pick up dinner at public kitchen, grab a drink and sit down in front of your computer to hear author, lily king, talk about her fifth novel, “writers and lovers”.

Written with King’s trademark humour, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

so how will this virtual book club event work?

1. buy a ticket. pick up the book at wordsworth (or have it delivered). see wordsworthbooks.com for details. start reading

2. a few days before the meeting you will get an email from harper collins publishers inviting you to “join” the zoom call. click on the link in the email to set yourself up with zoom to be ready to join the meeting at 6pm

3. the afternoon of the meeting, pick up the appetite for reading dinner package (see the menu below)* at public kitchen (300 victoria st). wine for the cocktail is not included in the dinner; however, you can buy wine at public kitchen at half price! go to kwpublictakeout.com for details

4. mix your drink. sit down in front of your computer and listen (and watch) lily talk about her book and answer questions

5. if you want, you can submit questions in real time (by chat) and she will answer them.

6. finally. no need to worry about hair and makeup. only lily will be on the screen!

   *dinner includes: smoked salmon and cream cheese mousse with crisps, tender greens with grilled chicken and goat cheese dressing, creme brulee with sponge toffee crumble, sangria mix (add your own wine).

don't forget our friends

we are missing seeing everyone at our periodic gatherings. with no clear end to all this uncertainty, we dont know when we will gather again to sip a cocktail. share a meal. exchange ideas about a book we all read together.

dont forget that our friends at public kitchen and wordsworth are continuing to operate during this time.

you can order takeout lunches and dinners from public kitchen by clicking here to order your meal, a bottle of wine, cocktail supplies and more!

and wordsworth continues to sell and deliver books to get you through all this. go shopping here

everybody stay healthy. and remember, we’re all in this together so lets help each other out.

thanks.

emma donoghue event postponed

at this uneasy time, we have decided to postpone the event with emma donoghue on march 30. we have not yet determined a new date for the event but all tickets for this sold out event will be honoured on the new date.

once we have determined the new date, we will reach out to all ticket holders first. should the new date be unsuitable, we will make arrangements to refund all but the cost of the book. we will then reach out to people on the wait list for the newly available tickets.

please dont forget our good friends at wordsworth books and public kitchen. the impact on both of these small local businesses is enormous. wordsworth is making arrangements for home delivery of books (call 519.884.2665) and public kitchen is opening the restaurant for take out orders (call 519.954.8111).

keep washing your hands. and watch out for your friends.

emma donoghue is returning!

“What begins as a larky story of unlikely male bonding turns into an off-center but far richer novel about the unheralded, imperfect heroism of two women — Michael’s incarcerated mother and Noah’s long deceased one — and the way we preserve the past and prepare for the future. What is family, anyway, but an elaborate web of story and memory, stretching backward and forward to connect us through time? Whether we’re brought together by blood or circumstance, it’s the psychic inheritance that inevitably wins out, equipping us with a sense of who we are and how we might ourselves respond when life invites us to answer the call, to live with skin fully in the game.

”

— the new york times book review

many of you will remember the night when emma donoghue delighted us with her observations about her book, ‘the wonder’. emma has a new book, ‘akin’, and we are delighted to announce that she is returning to kitchener on monday march 30 to talk with us about it. for tickets, click here

A tale of love, loss and family, in which a retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets. Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France. This odd couple, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, argue about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the trip is looking like a disaster. But as Michael's ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family’s past, both of them come to grasp the risks that people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.

“If Room forced home truths on us, about parenthood, responsibility and love, Akin deals with similar subject matter more subtly, but in the end just as compellingly; like Noah and Michael, the books are superficially different, but fundamentally connected. This is a quietly moving novel that shows us how little we know one another, but how little, perhaps, we need to know in order to care.”

— the guardian

a cure for the january blahs

“Becky Blake takes us on an extraordinary journey through Barcelona’s underbelly, exploring with empathy and insight the human need for belonging and security, and what it means to lose everything. Finely crafted and richly imagined, ‘proof i was here’ is an enthralling, intelligent and fast-paced novel you wont be able to put down”

— ayelet tsabari, author of 'the art of leaving'

the busiest month of the year is almost upon us but, after december whizs by, we will be in deepest darkest january. enter the next edition of appetite for reading: becky blake’s ‘proof i was here’ on monday january 20 at public kitchen.

Becky Blake has been a literary force for her short stories for several years (in 2013 and 2017 she was awarded the CBC Literary Prize for non-fiction (2017) and short fiction (2013). With ‘Proof I was Here’ Blake brings that literary power to her debut novel.

Buy tickets here

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose in Proof I Was Here, the debut novel by Toronto writer Becky Blake. Expat Niki walks out of her Barcelona apartment, leaving her relationship – along with her keys and wallet so that she no longer needs to be wary of strangers and thieves – and suddenly the city opens up for her. When a thief on the subway steals the one thing left in her pocket – a paint chip – Niki falls into his orbit, finding community with the knock-off purse-sellers and street performers who are his friends. A shoplifter since childhood – and facing an assault charge in Toronto – Niki is at home among the misfits, sheltering with them at night in the skeleton of a half-built tower whose construction has been halted since the 2008 economic downturn.”

— Quill and Quire

“‘Proof i was Here’ is laced with grit, art and angst. This evocative novel explores the intersection of privilege and survival, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, permanence and the ephemeral... it reminds us of the power of our choices, but also show how serendipity can, in a moment, change what we think about ourselves and the world”

— Leesa Dean, author of 'waiting for the cyclone'



an encore performance by michael crummey

michael crummey, poet and novelist, is returning on monday november 4 at public kitchen to talk to us about his new book, ‘the innocents’. that night in 2016 when michael joined us to talk about ‘sweetland’ (and so so much more) is so indelibly marked in our memories; we can’t wait to hear more from him.

buy tickets on the join us page

“A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family’s boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them.

As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.

This novel is richly imagined and compulsively readable, a riveting story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister. By turns electrifying and heartbreaking, it is a testament to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of our individual selves.”

a choice summer read to send you into autumn

we hate to talk about the fall when summer, it seems, has only just begun. but the first book for next year’s season of appetite for reading (our 5th!) is one you’ll want to grab and take it to wherever you love to read on these long summer days.

joanna goodman, author of ‘the home for unwanted girls’ will be in town in september and will join us on monday september 23 for dinner and some conversation.

tickets available on the join us page

Philomena meets Orphan Train in this suspenseful, provocative novel filled with love, secrets, and deceit—the story of a young unwed mother who is forcibly separated from her daughter at birth and the lengths to which they go to find each other.

In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility—much like Maggie Hughes’ parents. Maggie’s English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don’t include marriage to the poor French boy on the next farm over. But Maggie’s heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents force her to give baby Elodie up for adoption and get her life ‘back on track’.

Elodie is raised in Quebec’s impoverished orphanage system. It’s a precarious enough existence that takes a tragic turn when Elodie, along with thousands of other orphans in Quebec, is declared mentally ill as the result of a new law that provides more funding to psychiatric hospitals than to orphanages. Bright and determined, Elodie withstands abysmal treatment at the nuns’ hands, finally earning her freedom at seventeen, when she is thrust into an alien, often unnerving world.

Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel spurs a wrenching choice. As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth that has been denied them both.

and that's it for this year

“A fast-paced, funny and at times powerfully poignant chronicle of a city and its environs, and a reminder of the vital importance of a local and independent press, Midnight Light brings the Northwest Territories and its remarkable and proud people to vivid life.”

— penguin random house

“With a novelist’s eye for nuance, detail and character, Bidini has done the country an immense favour bringing our wild North to life in this exquisitely evocative book.”

— toronto star

“[north of 60] is an area where, unlike the rest of the country, truth and reconciliation is not an ever-ready political buzzword; rather, it’s a work in progress. One of Bidini’s strengths as a writer is his reportorial skill, and the book includes many voices, including a First Nations writer, Tim Querengesser. His take on the city reflects its essence: “‘Yellowknife just kinda works. Indigenous people come here because they’re respected. They aren’t segregated the way we are elsewhere.’””

— toronto star

our last event of the year is on monday may 6 at public kitchen with best-selling and beloved author, dave bidini, with us to talk about his latest book, ‘midnight light: a personal journey to the north”.

in ‘midnight light’ dave uses his stint as guest columnist at the Yellowknifer newspaper to explore the "Gateway to the North," the meaning of community, and the issues facing residents and their daily lives.
As a journalist, author and founding member of the trail-blazing band Rheostatics, Dave Bidini has had the privilege to explore Canada's immense geography. Yet, in all his many travels, he'd never visited the Northwest Territories. After an all-too-brief visit to a literary festival in Yellowknife, Bidini was hooked on the place and its people. When he returned home, all he could do was think about going back to the North. 
Facing a career crossroads and with memories of his recent visit to the Northwest Territories still fresh, Bidini, in a bold move, contacts the Yellowknifer, one of the last truly loval and independent newspapers, and signs on as a guest columnist for an unforgettable summer. 
The Yellowknifer, like the city it serves, bucks all trends as a completely community-focused newspaper. Bidini's new position gives him access to a region that is on the one hand lost in time, and on the other faced with the stark realities of poverty, racism and addiction. Along the way, Midnight Light introduces readers to an extraordinary cast of Dene elders, entrepreneurs, artists, politicians and law enforcement officers as well as an assortment of complicated souls from the South who are looking for a chance to rebuild their lives and who face the same harsh economic realities as their new neighbours.
A fast-paced, funny and at times powerfully poignant chronicle of a city and its environs, and a reminder of the vital importance of a local and independent press, Midnight Light brings the Northwest Territories and its remarkable and proud people to vivid life.

spring has sprung

well almost sprung. maybe by the time this next event rolls around, we will see a few meagre signs.

monday april 1 at public kitchen we will have drinks, dinner and some conversation with susan swan, author of ‘the western light’. buy tickets here

Susan Swan’s critically acclaimed fiction has been published in twenty countries. Her novel, The Western Light, (published by Cormorant Books 2012) tells the story about a girl’s love for a dubious father substitute, an ex-NHL star and convicted murderer. Its heroine Mouse Bradford appeared in her international bestseller, The Wives of Bath, which was made into a feature film, Lost and Delirious (2001). The Wives of Bath, (about a murder in a girls’ boarding school) was a 1993 finalist for the U.K.’s Guardian Award and Ontario’s Trillium Award. It was picked by a U.S. Readers’ Guide as one of the best novels of the nineties.

“Swan vividly recreates that seemingly innocent period in the 1950s, casting the reader back through her brilliant time machine of words, when people still received an evening newspaper on their doorstep and kids traded hockey cards with pictures of Tim Horton and others. ”

— the toronto star