We’re very happy to share this month, for the first time, a Loan Stars top 10 list made up entirely of Canadian contributors! That’s right, all 10 books on this list have at least one author, illustrator, translator or editor (in the case of an edited collection of material) who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada.
Loan Stars is the readers’ advisory tool that allows libraries across Canada to indicate popular upcoming titles. Using LibraryData, the library data aggregation service, the forthcoming titles with the most orders become Loan Stars top picks!
You can see each book and find out a bit more about them in the list below, or you can download our poster if you want to display it, say in your library or on social media (tag us: @LoanStars!). You can also view these titles on CataList in this catalogue.
March 2023 Canadian List
Loan Stars top pick:
Old Babes in the Wood
by Margaret Atwood🍁
9780771003721 | Short Stories
Description:
Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories — some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine — explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect.
Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.
Birnam Wood
by Eleanor Catton🍁
9780771024375 | Thrillers
Description:
From the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is an electrifying eco-thriller grounded in a provocative and sly exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our times. Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
A Death at the Party
by Amy Stuart🍁
9781668009109 | Thrillers
Description:
Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbours all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite — everything’s going according to plan. But Nadine — devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter — finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this?
Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns, and her mother — only her mother knows that today isn’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well.
Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it’s hard to forget when Nadine’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happen when her guests unite.
The Fake
by Zoe Whittall🍁
9781443455275 | Literary
Description:
Gibson is fresh from divorce, almost forty, and deeply depressed. Then he falls in love with Cammie. Not only is he having the best sex of his life with a woman so attractive he’s stunned she even glanced his way, he feels truly known for the first time in his life. But Gibson’s friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he, too, has to admit that all the drama in Cammie’s life can feel a bit over the top.
When Gibson and Shelby meet, they realize Cammie’s stories don’t always add up. In fact, they’re far from the truth. But what kind of a person would lie about having cancer? And what does it say about Shelby and Gibson that they fell for it? From the author of The Best Kind of People and The Spectacular comes a sharp, emotional novel about lies, liars and the people who love them.
Anna Olson’s Baking Wisdom
by Anna Olson🍁
9780525610977 | Methods
Description:
Inside Baking Wisdom lies the answer to every baking question you’ve ever had (and many you haven’t yet), plus over 150 perfected recipes — both savoury and sweet — for bakers of all skill levels. Get inside Anna’s baking brain, as she shares a career’s worth of experience to build a true masterclass in baking. In this incredible baking compendium, you will learn the hows and whys of baking through her flawless techniques, patient advice and literally hundreds of photos. This is an all-encompassing guide, guaranteed to make you a better baker.
The Movement Miracle
by Miranda Esmonde-White🍁
9780735275256 | Exercise
Description:
Miranda Esmonde-White’s fitness revolution began with a simple insight: many exercise programs, including the ones she used to teach at her own studio, actually cause injury and prematurely age the body, bulking muscles and restricting joints. Throwing out the idea of “no pain, no gain,” she studied how we are actually designed to move, creating a program that stretches and strengthens all the muscles in the body in a balanced way, enhances the full range of motion of every joint, and unglues stuck connective tissue. The result is Essentrics, a groundbreaking practice of gentle movement, respecting the muscle chains and joint mobility of the body, that scientists from Harvard, Adelphi and McGill universities have validated as a way to keep us strong, flexible and fit for life, as well as providing immense benefits for brain and digestive health.
How Not to Kill Yourself
by Clancy Martin🍁
9780593317051 | Personal Memoirs
Description:
In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.
The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself — like other self-destructive desires — is almost always temporary and avoidable.
The Book of Rain
by Thomas Wharton🍁
9781039002432 | Nature & the Environment
Description:
The northern mining town of River Meadows is one of three hotspots in the world producing ghost ore, a new source of energy worth twenty-eight times its weight in gold. It’s also linked with slippages of time and space that gradually render the area uninhabitable. After the town is evacuated, the whole region is cordoned off, the new no-go zone wryly nicknamed “the Park.”
Three intertwined stories flow from the disaster of River Meadows. Alex Hewitt and his sister, Amery, were among the first to be shipped out of the contaminated town. Now an accomplished game designer, Alex has moved on, but his sister has not, making increasingly dangerous break-ins to save animals trapped in the toxic wasteland. When at last she fails to return from a trip inside the fence, Alex flies to River Meadows to search for her, enlisting her friend, Michio Amano, a mathematician who needs to transcend the known laws of physics if he and Alex are to succeed.
Sabai
by Pailin Chongchitnant🍁
9780525611714 | Regional & Ethnic
Description:
Pailin Chongchitnant knows that a busy schedule can make learning new recipes seem intimidating — whether you’re familiar with the cuisine or not. In her second book, Pai will empower you to make Thai food part of your everyday routine, with a compilation of authentic and straightforward recipes, like Beef Laab or Green Curry Chicken with Winter Melon, that are quick to make and delicious to eat. From prepping, to cooking, to eating, the dishes in this book can be done sabai sabai, as the saying goes.
Pai takes you through every recipe with her signature level of detail and warm, encouraging style. And she’s thought of plenty of shortcuts, tips, and tricks to get dinner on the table, no matter how hectic the day has been. There are even QR codes linking to her YouTube videos on tips, techniques, and more to support you every step of the way.
My Thali
by Joe Thottungal🍁 and Anne DesBrisay🍁
9781773271958 | Regional & Ethnic
Description:
In My Thali, award-winning chef and author Joe Thottungal shares his favourite home-cooked recipes and stories from his homeland of Kerala, connecting past and present in the world of Indian cooking today. This exploration of food heritage features a collection of 85 signature recipes — from simple raitas to nourishing dals and fragrant curries — that can be easily re-created at home, using accessible ingredients and everyday cooking equipment, and without any compromise to flavour or authenticity. Each recipe can be enjoyed on its own or joined together to compose a complete and balanced meal; suggested menus are included for constructing these "feasts on a plate." My Thali celebrates the South Indian cooking and the joys of thalis, both simple and homey, and grand and glorious.
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The BISAC to Thema translator has been updated.