February 2020: Books selection by Librairie Bertrand

The Librairie Bertrand is offering their special selection of books! This February, Claire the librarian is telling you all about her suggestions and why these are her favourite books of the month!

Daughter from the Dark - Marina Dyachenko

This is one of those books you can't put down, because you need to know what's going to happen. What is the truth? What is a hallucination? What is real and what is a fantasy?

Did that teddy bear really attack people, or was Aspirin hypnotized to think he saw/felt these things? Is Alyona really some kind of fairy child/angel looking for her long lost brother?

The Dyachenkos really know how to hook you in. You'll be racing to the last page because you want the truth.

Last Night in Nuuk - Niviaq Korneliussen

There are exactly zero writers from Greenland, a country with a population the size of New Brunswick, New Jersey, that have become household names in the United States. Try to name one, I dare you. Hopefully, that changes with queer, Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen's breakout novel (translated into English by Anna Halager), an absorbing and sad coming-out tale centred around five young adults in the writer's home country's capital city of Nuuk. Korneliussen takes care to make the background of the city, particularly its nightlife and smallness, come alive as her characters grapple with their identities and complicated, entwined relationships, on top of the country's entrenched homophobia and distinct neuroses.

Catch and Kill - Ronan Farrow

To make media reporting riveting to anyone not in the media is no small feat, and Farrow, whose journalistic chops are as respected as any in the business, has done just that here. This is the story of the work Farrow and dozens of other reporters and fact-checkers (Farrow never forgets the fact-checkers!) put into the seminal story of the #MeToo movement, which outed Harvey Weinstein as a serial predator. It's also a story of Eastern European espionage and the insidious connections between powerful media figures and celebrities so decidedly noir-ish that Dashiell Hammett himself, had he been alive to read it, might have wished he'd written it. This is the rare big-name political reporting book worthy of the hype.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk

This year, two Nobel Prizes in Literature were awarded -- one to a Bosnian genocide apologist and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milošević eulogist, and one to a Polish novelist whose fierce condemnations of nationalism in her home country have been nearly as widely condemned by Poland's right-wing as her novels have been praised by everyone else. Last year, Olga Tokarczuk brought home the Man Booker International Prize for Flights -- likely the novel that won her, a year late, the 2018 Nobel as well -- but this year saw the release of her latest English-language translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Besides having the best title of any novel this year, the book blurs the lines between thriller and fairy tale in a literary detective novel that asks hard questions about human nature and the social contract. It's unputdownable and of great literary import. Books like this don't come around that often.

Strange planet – Nathan W. Pyle

Strange Planet is an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple, based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name!
With dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favourites, this book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own.

The cool bean – Jory John

Everyone knows the cool beans. They’re sooooo cool.
And then there’s the uncool has-bean . . .
Always on the sidelines, one bean unsuccessfully tries everything he can to fit in with the crowd—until one day the cool beans show him how it’s done.

With equal measures of humour, wit, and charm, the #1 New York Times bestselling duo Jory John and Pete Oswald craft another incredible picture book, reminding us that it’s cooler to be kind.