Award Winner: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Making lots of 2019 round-ups is Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House. This touching, multigenerational memoir was highly anticipated, and that excitement was justified as it later won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a New York Times bestseller. Kirkus Reviews calls it, "A tribute to the multitude of stories one small home can contain." Available now!

Beautiful Boy

David Sheff's touching memoir recounting the harrowing tale of his son's journey through addiction, adapted by Amazon Studios, is hitting the big screen this fall. Initially published in 2009, Beautiful Boy is the haunting and heartbreaking story of a journalist desperately researching ways to help, and a father that refuses to give up on his son. Check out the first full trailer here. 

Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace

There are no easy solutions. This sentiment has echoed throughout the world as the conflict between Israel and Palestine has rumbled along generation through generation. In his new memoir, former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak recounts growing up in this reality, the first seven decades of his country's existence and, through candid assessment of his fellow Israeli politicians, its major successes and its biggest misjudgments. Barak recently joined CBC's The Current to discuss his memoir, as well as current Prime Minister Netanyahu and the future of Israel. My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace is available now.

Dave Itzkoff on CBC

From Mork & Mindy, to Aladdin, to Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams's career brought joy to many. His biography, written by New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff, was released on May 15. In Robin, Itzkoff attempts to answer some of the lingering questions we have about the beloved entertainer following his death four years ago.

In his interview with Tom Power on CBC q, Itzkoff describes Williams as more subdued and thoughtful than the mania of some of his roles would suggest; he describes Williams as "empathetic" and "generous of self." Williams spoke openly about his battle with addiction and depression, either through his comedy or in interviews. Toward the end of his life, he was plagued by a debilitating condition, the effects of which never fully came to light until after his death. 

Listen to the interview here. 

History, Family, Promises

Through touching narrative and surreal illustration, Margie Wolfe's The Promise tells the true story of two sisters, her Mother and her Aunt, forced into labour at Auschwitz during the holocaust. Before being stolen away, they received from their parents three gold coins and a promise to keep - stay together. Wolfe, co-founder of Second Story Press, recently joined CBC's The Next Chapter to discuss the story behind the story, her family's history, and the making of the book - Listen to the full discussion here. 

James Comey in Toronto

It’s been one year since former FBI director James Comey was fired. His recently-released book A Higher Loyalty discusses Comey’s career in the American government as well as ideas surrounding ethical leadership. In his interview with Piya Chattopadhyay on CBC’s The Current, Comey discusses the ways in which leadership should remain focused on truth, integrity and fairness; he also provides us with the one question we should ask before making a significant decision: "How would I explain this to my grandchildren?". 

Listen to the interview here.

Lois Lowry: 6 books that changed my life

Lois Lowry's Looking Back: A Book of Memories, will be coming out in a new edition early next year. She recently talked to the CBC about the 6 books that changed her life. 2 of the books she picked were by our very own Robertson Davies and Margret Atwood. You can see the full list here.

D+Q Authors and Cartoonists to Tour This Fall!

Some of our favourite D+Q authors and cartoonists are touring this fall! 

CHESTER BROWN

Winnipeg: Tuesday October 22nd, 2013 Grant Park in the Atrium

Toronto:  November 13th, 2013 AGO

Upon its release in 2003, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography received both praise and criticism before winning two Harvey Awards. This expanded edition includes a new introduction highlighting the work's impact and success as Chester Brown reinvented the biography genre. 

Celebrating ten years since the release of his comic-strip biography, Louis Riel, Brown will be in Winnipeg for what would be Louis Riel's 169th birthday. He will also appear at the Art Gallery of Ontario where his original artwork will be displayed. 

SETH
Toronto: IOFA October 24th-November 3rd, 2013

Seth is back! His new volume, Palookaville 21 features not one but two autobiographical pieces before continuing the Clyde Fans serial in part three. Bonus: an exclusive comic-strip Seth has been keeping for almost a decade!

Seth will be attending this year's International Festival of Authors downtown Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre. The festival runs for 11 days with readings by the Governor General's Literary Award and Rogers Writer's Trust Fiction Prize finalists. Other participants include Margaret Atwood, Eric Walters, Joseph Boyden, Stephen King and many more!

For more information, click here. 

Billy Crystal is Still Foolin' 'Em!

If you're like me, you absolutely loved Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, and Analyze This. I was so excited to hear that at 65, Billy is releasing, Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?, what he calls a "non-memoir" written about him by him. He opens up about his past experiences in the business, what it's like growing old, and shares exclusive memories with other comedy idols as they won over our hearts.

Undoubtedly, that irresistible Billy Crystal wit and humour jumps from each page. The book is also available in audio version, with live readings from Billy's performances. I highly recommend you check out this hilarious interview with Billy Crystal on the Daily Show!

Maude of Cavendish

The Complete Journals of LM Montgomery, The PEI Years, 1901-1911 has just been released and it provides a fascinating look at Lucy Maude Montgomery’s life from her late 20s into her late 30s. The first entries describe her working life as a copyeditor in Halifax before she moved home to Cavendish, PEI to care for her recently widowed grandmother. Montgomery wrote her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, after returning to PEI and she also met her future husband during this time. The last few journals entries were written on her honeymoon when she was contemplating whether she had made the right choice. The journals also feature 300 b&w photos, most of them taken by Montgomery.

The Complete Journals of LM Montgomery, The PEI Years, 1889-1900 was published in 2012 and follows LM Montgomery from ages 15-26. It was chosen as one of the Top 100 Books of 2012 by The Globe & Mail.

Hollywood Left and Right

This fascinating book describes how movie stars have influenced American politics. Each chapter is focuses on a different movie star beginning with one of the first stars, Charlie Chaplin. He used his fame to promote socialist views and this got him into trouble with the US government.
Jane Fonda was nicknamed “Hanoi Jane” after a disastrous trip to Vietnam to protest the war. She was also involved in many other causes and was a mentor for several younger celebrity activists like Sarah Jessica Parker. The chapter about Harry Belafonte describes his deep involvement with the Civil Rights movement and his close friendship with Martin Luther King Jr.
Hollywood Left and Right also includes chapters on Arnold Schwarznegger, Warren Beatty, Charlton Heston, Ronald Regan and George Murphy, Edward G. Robinson and Louis B. Mayer.

The Castrato and His Wife

This book tells the story of Giusto Tenducci, an Italian opera singer and castrato, who was wildly famous in the mid-1700s. He sang for Marie Antoinette and was friends with some of the leading composers of the time, including Bach and Mozart, who composed music specifically for Tenducci. He spent most of his adult life living and performing in England, but for a short time lived in Ireland.
In Ireland he was hired to tutor a very talented young woman, Dorothea Maunsell, who was from a rich and influential Protestant family. The two became very close and eventually eloped, causing a huge scandal. First of all, Tenducci was fifteen years older than Dorothea, he was a castrato, and he was also Catholic. Her family was outraged.
Dorothea’s father hired soldiers to chase the pair and Tenducci was thrown in prison twice, but eventually they made their way to England where they lived happily for five or six years. Then the spirited Dorothea eloped with another man.
The Castrato and His Wife is much more than a biography. It tells the story of a group of men, the castrati, who lived unusual lives at the edges of society. It’s also a fascinating look at the history of opera.

On the Road Again

As a publishers’ sales rep I spend a lot of time in my car driving to libraries and bookstores, or just the office. In January someone gave me a gift of The Room on CD, and since then I’ve become hooked on listening to books in my car. Now, getting caught in traffic on the QEW is much less aggravating.

The Toronto Public Library has a wonderful selection of books on CD. When it comes to listening to books, fiction works best, and one of my recent favourites was The Help. It is performed like a play, with different actresses taking on the voices of various characters. (I think I developed a slight southern drawl during the week I spent listening to this). A surprise hit for me was a spiritual book called, The Shack. It’s a story about a man who spends a weekend at a shack where he meets and talks with God. I also got very involved in all the Jackson Brody literary mysteries by Kate Atkinson. They’re very dark, but Atkinson is a beautiful writer who is very good at creating characters with a lot of depth. Start with Case Histories and you won’t be able to stop until you’ve listened to all four books in the series.

Unfortunately, non-fiction doesn’t work as well on CD, but the exception is biography because it’s usually got a strong narrative like fiction. I was surprised that I enjoyed My Life by Keith Richards as much as I did – even though I still think the guy’s a jerk. It's read by Johnny Depp, Keith Richards and a British actor. However, my favourite biography on CD is When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man by Jerry Weintraub, a Hollywood producer who started in the music business managing John Denver. He also has some great stories about working with Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and many contemporary and actors like George Clooney. With a distinct Bronx accent, Weintraub reads his own story for the audio, and it’s an entertaining, funny and poignant tale of a very interesting and full life.

Jane Lynch's Happy Accidents

I've been a Jane Lynch fan ever since I saw 'Best in Show'. So, I'm really excited about Jane's new autobiography Happy Accidents, which will be hitting stores (and library shelves) September 13th!

Check out the video trailers below! The first, was filmed just after Jane finished recording the audio edition and will tell you a bit more about the book and the process of writing it.


And now- a special message recorded just for us in Canada!



Are you excited too?!! I have a five galleys up for grabs for the first five Canadian librarians to e-mail me at rosalyn.steele@harpercollins.com.

Please use 'Happy Accidents' as the subject of your e-mail and please be sure to include the full mailing address of your library.

-Rosalyn

Piaf en Rose. . .

For all those Edith Piaf fans out there, Carolyn Burke's new biography, No Regrets has just been published. It's quite the life!  I'd also like to recommend Martha Wainwright's amazing collection of Piaf songs.  What I love about this CD is that Wainwright has stayed away from the big hits and chosen a lot of songs that normally don't get covered. And she can belt them out with all the emotional passion of Piaf herself - it's really a terrific album.

The Importance of Being Married to Ernest . . .

If you've been enjoying Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife - her fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's relationship with his first wife Hadley Richardson, told from her perspective - you might be interested in following up on some of his subsequent wives (he had four in all).  The most fascinating of them is definitely Martha Gellhorn who was a talented journalist and writer in her own right and led just as full and adventurous life. Their relationship was combative both personally and professionally and she was the one who left him.  Caroline Moorehead's wonderful biography Martha Gellhorn: A Life was a Dewey pick of mine, back when it came out several years ago. It would make great reading in preparation for HBO's upcoming film about Hemingway and Gellhorn, which is shooting now with some interesting casting.  Clive Owen is playing Hemingway, and Nicole Kidman has nabbed the role of Gellhorn.  Hmmm, not really sure about Kidman - I could totally see Cate Blanchett playing Martha instead.  Molly Parker plays Pauline Pfeiffer, wife number two, and Parker Posey plays his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway.  There's no mention of poor Hadley; the story - and Ernest - have clearly moved on.  More on the film here.

Simon Winchester in Wonderland

Charles Dodgson — better known by his nom de plume, Lewis Carroll — was a shy young professor at Oxford University when he first met Alice Liddell and her family in 1856. Alice’s father, Henry Liddell, was the dean of the Oxford College where Charles taught math and the two men became close friends. Charles enjoyed picnics and boating with the ten Liddell children, and he often fabricated elaborate tales to entertain them.
On one occasion he created a fanciful tale about Alice and her adventures after falling down a rabbit hole, and the little girl begged him to write the story down. Eventually Charles presented her with a handwritten copy of Alice’s Adventures Underground. In 1865, Macmillan UK published a revised version which was double in length and had a new title.
Charles Dodgson was not only a mathematical genius and an imaginative writer, but he was also very talented in the new art of photography. The Alice Behind Wonderland focuses on a particular photograph he took of Alice, and uses this famous picture as a starting point in an examination of the inspiration behind one of the most famous children’s classics of all time.

An Exclusive Love. . .

Reading Johanna Adorján's An Exclusive Love , translated by Anthea Bell, inevitably makes one think about your own grandparents. Most of us take them for granted, especially when we're very young, and by the time we're adults ourselves and take a greater interest in our family history, sadly they are often no longer with us.  Who doesn't have a slew of questions they'd now love to ask?

In the case of Adorján, her grandparents' deaths together by suicide raised a number of questions that she knew would never be answered, especially as it was a subject her family never wanted to talk about. Her grandparents - both Hungarian Jews - had survived the Holocaust and the communist uprising, fleeing to Denmark where they lived for the remainder of their lives. They also would never talk about their past. Adorján was only twenty when they died.

Her memoir details her search for more information about her grandparents' lives. She interviews their friends and visits the concentration camp where her grandfather nearly died. She doesn't find out much; this is not the type of book that has a huge secret to reveal.  Rather, it's the task itself that not only helps her to grieve, but also to examine the ways she herself fits into her family story, and how that inheritance affects her sense of identity, particularly in terms of her Jewish heritage. Interspersed with her research are imagined episodes from the last day of her grandparents' life, filled with what might seem to be tiny and mundane details, but are all the more moving given the context. The book is thoughtful, never sensationalist, and written with a poignant respect for its subjects and subject matter.  Truly a book that  would interest readers of all ages, and could be shared among three different generations.

Doris McCarthy 1910-2010

Last week we lost a true Canadian treasure when Dorothy McCarthy passed away. I had the fortune of having tea with her with some lovely booksellers and librarians at her home in Scarborough: Fool's Paradise. It was in celebration of one of her biography Doris McCarthy: My Life...and what a life it was. Although we just had a brief afternoon with her I was blown away by her tenacity and talent. The Globe had a lovely piece about her that you can read.

Guilty Weekend Reading. . .

It's been a bit of a tough week and I'm not moving as fast through Doctor Zhivago as I'd like, so I've taken a break to indulge in some guilty celebrity-peeping.  I recently finished Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?, her memoir of her thirty-plus years living with Harold Pinter, who is one of my favourite playwrights.  Drawn from her diaries and personal memories, it reads a bit like a carefully selected (and edited) whirlwind through their lives, but with lots of interesting name-dropping (if you are a fan of the theatre, there are some great stories).  What does impress is how romantic Harold was, always sending her flowers and writing and reciting love poems.  And it definitely made me dig out some Pinter plays for a re-read.  England seems to excel at successful literary pairings - Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble, Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, Richard Holmes and Rose Tremain to name a few - perhaps because each of these writers mostly excels in a different genre from their partner.

For a look at more torturous literary couplings, I've just started Ivana Lowell's memoir Why Not Say What Happened? She is the daughter of Caroline Blackwood whose own tempestuous life I got interested in after reading Great Granny Webster for my NYRB challenge.  Her father was Ivan Moffat, Hollywood screenwriter and the son of Iris Tree, the bohemian actress and writer who modeled for many of the Bloomsbury painters. Her stepfather was the American poet Robert Lowell.  Ivana's grandmother Maureen was the one that Noel Coward wrote about in his song "I Went to a Marvellous Party".  I'm only a few chapters in, but the book promises quite a lot of aristocratic parties with famous people, much drinking and subsequent bad behaviour.  The New York Times reviewed it this weekend here.

And yes, I also have the latest edition of Hello magazine - the one with Kate and Wills on the cover.  Anyone else think it's rather creepy that he gave her Diana's engagement ring? It wasn't exactly a symbol of the happiest of unions, was it now?