Showing results by publisher "Random House Canada" in All Categories

Two old friends, who first met in university, get together for a weekend of golfing: Allan, a football hero, worldly and financially successful, and his quieter friend, nicknamed Byron, lame from a childhood injury, a smart fellow who became a lawyer but who has never left home, staying put so he could care for a mother with Alzheimer's.

In 1966, a male baby, Chris, was adopted by an upper-middle-class Toronto family. From early childhood, Chris felt ill at ease as a boy and like an outsider in his conservative family. An obsession with sports - running, waterskiing, and cycling - helped him survive what he would eventually understand to be a profound disconnect between his anatomical sexual identity and his gender identity. In his 20s, with the support of newfound friends and family and the medical community, Chris became Kristen.

A shattering, utterly immersive work of investigative journalism, The Good Girls slips behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India to tell the real story behind the tragic deaths of two teenage girls and an epidemic of violence against women.

In the midst of war, an ordinary miracle: an abandoned baby tenderly cared for by a young boy living on the streets of Saigon. The boy is Louis, the child of a long-gone American soldier. Louis calls the baby em Hồng, em meaning "little sister," or "beloved." Even though her cradle is nothing more than a cardboard box, em Hồng's life holds every possibility.

Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband - a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal. Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch....

Best-selling Scotiabank Giller Award-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes and new insights to today's urgent conversation on race and racism in startling, illuminating essays that grow out of his own experience as a Black man moving through the world.

On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in Northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers' wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force; now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors.

Sparked by extraordinary experiences that occurred in her family when her father and her sister both died in 2008, Patricia Pearson was launched on a journey of investigation into what she calls "a curious sort of modern underground - a world beneath the secular world, inhabited by ordinary human beings having extraordinary experiences that they aren't, on the whole, willing to disclose".

Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family is among only a few who survived. But the mountain that looms over the city is still green - somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go.

For socialite Caroline Kimball, travel has become an escape—a way to run from her adult responsibilities while hiding her musical ambitions from her disapproving mother. When she meets handsome magazine photographer Jack “Tex” Fairchild beside a hotel pool in Acapulco, everything changes. His encouragement shows her she could have a life beyond that of a beautiful, bored heiress, and he convinces her that maybe her childish daydreams aren’t so impossible after all.

Many of us feel constant pressure to mask and curate who we are—to perform as someone we’re not rather than be who we are. And it hurts us. But we don't need to live this way. With We've Got This, award-winning and globally recognized DEI and empowerment expert Ritu Bhasin delivers a much-needed guidebook on how to heal, thrive, and stand in your power in the face of hate and hardships. She reveals how to unlock belonging—for yourself and for others.

In a world ruled by the cruel and merciless Stars, Elara has been cursed by fate. A prophecy promises she will fall for a Star, but that it will kill them both. So when Ariete, Star of Wrath, War and Chaos, descends to wreak havoc on Elara’s kingdom, she flees her home—the Kingdom of Night—for the neighbouring Helios, Kingdom of Light. And strides straight into the arms of an enemy prince.

Italy's Rosselli family were members of the cosmopolitan, cultural elite in Florence at the start of the twentieth century. Led by their fierce matriarch, Amelia Rosselli, they were also vocal anti-fascists. As Mussolini rose to power in Italy following WWI, the Rossellis took leading roles in the rebellion against him, a stance that few in their class would risk. And when Mussolini established a police state whose tactics grew more brutal, the Rossellis and their anti-fascist friends transformed from debaters and critics into activists.

When Leah is eight, her mother, Cessie, abruptly flees her role as a rural housewife in search of a glamorous career in the city. In the chaotic years that follow, Cessie lurches from one apartment, job, and toxic romance to the next. In a home without rules or emotional boundaries, daughter and mother become close confidantes—a state of enmeshment that suits them both. Their bond is loving but also marked by casual indifference. Cessie’s self-described parenting style of “benign neglect” is a hilarious party joke, but for her daughter it’s reality.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier.

1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire.

Last Winter is the story of a child who might not survive the heartbreak of her father’s death and a mother who struggles to both parent and manage her grief in the grips of a bipolar crisis. Atmospheric and deftly told with an economy of words and a finely tuned gaze on the small moments that build up to an inexorable and shocking end, this is a contemporary drama that will grip listeners both for the story and for the vibrant portrayal of the complexities of family life. 

Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish, and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May - novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. As friends and neighbors are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins.

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy changed sides in WWII and the Germans, now their enemies, occupied the north of the country, an Italian Resistance was born. Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca were four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance, living secretively in the mountains surrounding Turin. They were not alone. Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies battled their way north, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators.

January, 1980. At the height of the Cold War, Petra Kelly inspires hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to protest the placement of nuclear missiles on West German soil - including a NATO general named Emil Gerhardt, who shocks the establishment by converting to the cause. Petra and her general not only vault to fame as the stars of the Green Party, but they also fall in love. Then Manfred Schwartz, an ex-lover, urges Petra to draw back the curtain on Emil's war record, and they enter a world both complicated and threatening.