Help us get on Canada Reads!

Every year CBC’s Canada Reads hosts a “battle of the books,” where five celebrity panelists defend their favourite work of Canadian fiction. Over the course of three months, books will be eliminated one by one until one panelist triumphs with the book for Canada to read that year.

Want to be involved? This year, Canada Reads has opened up the selective process to the public.  Throughout the month of October, YOU and your friends can vote for what you consider to be the ESSENTIAL CANADIAN BOOK OF THE DECADE! The top 40 choices will be put on a shortlist for the panelists to choose from.  To make your recommendation fill out the online form here: http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/

Can’t decide? Here are some of our recommended titles:

The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman
 

"The Heart Specialist is an electrocardiogram of a novel. Claire Holden Rothman sensitively traces the peaks and valleys experienced by a woman breaking through the formidable gender barriers of early twentieth-century medicine. Her Dr. Agnes White is a fascinating character, an anomaly in her time, an authority on the human heart who knows so little of the workings of her own. I ached for her."

— Caroline Adderson, author of Pleased to Meet You

 Still Life with June by Darren Greer
 

"It's hilarious and redemptive, brimming with revelation. Still Life With June is modern and urban without being too edgy for the masses. This book is highly recommended."

— The Edmonton Journal

Oonagh by Mary Tilberg
 

"Beautifully written by this masterful storyteller, Oonagh draws us into a story of race and class, joy and sorrow, fear and newfound freedom writ large. The tale of Chauncey Taylor’s flight to freedom, his success in his barbering business in Upper Canada, and his love for his sharp-tongued Irish lass are painted with a fine hand, as are the underlying tensions of race and class that threaten their union."

— Karolyn Smardz Frost, author of I've Got a Home in Glory Land

 Oodori by Darcy Tamayose
 

"Tamayose's prose brims with lyrical display ... We're offered fervid reminders of nature's beauty every few pages ... Odori is finally a war novel, its point to seek meaning amid chaos, to show the exquisite and eternal amid the blood and brutality and death. Yet where Tamayose truly excels, where her writing seizes you (well, me) in mind and heart, is where mortal truths insist on breaking through her gauzy curtain."

— The Globe and Mail

New Under the Sun by Kevin Major
 

“"[poses] a profound question that will leave readers wondering about race, history, legacy, and compromise ... a skilful work of fiction."

— Quill and Quire

Canada Reads 2011 will air in February 2011. Tune in to see if your title will be picked as the title for Canada to read!

We are digital!

Our quest here at Cormorant Books is, first and foremost, to deliver great literature. Part of that means providing readers with the option of enjoying their literature in as many ways as possible. So it should come as no surprise that, starting this summer, we will be making a growing library of our titles available in ebook format.


The first six titles available are Beyond Measure by Pauline Holdstock, Born With a Tooth by Joseph Boyden, Home Schooling by Carol Windley, Pure Inventions by James King, The Frankenstein Murders by Kathlyn Bradshaw, and The Worlds Within Her by Neil Bissoondath.

Check out our ebook page here.

Preview: Jeanne's Road

It is 1933. A journalist travels to the small mining town of Rouyn in northern Quebec — a community that has become a refuge for Russians, Finns, Ukrainians, Chinese, and Jews. While there, he crosses paths with famed Canadian Marxist Jeanne Corbin, who has come to rally a group of striking workers, and sees his life forever changed. Jeanne’s Road is an essential read, bringing to life a lost era of Quebec history through its powerful yet unsentimental love story.

Read the preview here

Hooked on Canadian Books is a Globe and Mail bestseller!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/bestsellers/

#4 in Literature. Hurrah!

Still Life with June is Salty Ink's Book of the Month for April

The fine folks at Salty Ink, a website that shines a spotlight on Atlantic fiction, has chosen Darren Greer's hilarious, profound, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting novel Still Life With June as its April Book of the Month.

This is a snippet of what they have to say about it:

Still Life with June was, by page 9 or 10, clearly going to be of the best books I’d read all year. Before I’d finished it, it had become a plain favourite book of mine. It’s all there: great writing, a distinctive style, an engaging story told in a calculated way.

And that's just the beginning. Click here to read the rest of the review/tribute.

Announcing Dancing Cat Books, our new Children's/YA imprint!

Noticed the new banner? That's to celebrate the launch of our new imprint, Dancing Cat Books, dedicated to publishing author-driven literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for the young adult and middle-grades, as well as picture books.

Visit www.dancingcatbooks.com and learn all about it!

Preview: Hooked on Canadian Books - The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984

Having been a contributing reviewer for The Globe and Mail for more than twenty years, T.F. Rigelhof knows good literature. This conversational survey of the novels published since 1984 presents his readings of well-known Canadian writers while bringing the work of newer and lesser-known voices to more deserving attention.

Read the introduction