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  The Mystery of the Spanish Chest...

  Agatha Christie

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  Major Hastings and Hercule Poirot are not interested in the mystery of the Spanish Chest, which has been reported in the papers so often that it seems to be an entirely closed case. But, when Hastings persuades Poirot to attend a fabulous party given by Lady Chatterton, they discover someone sequestered upstairs who is desperate for their help. Will the contents of a dead man’s pockets reveal to the inscrutable eye of Hercule Poirot who the culprit is?

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  The Sleeping Car Porter

  Suzette Mayr

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  FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA'S INSTAGRAM 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 
  WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 
  WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION 
  FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION 
  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022 
  OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE 
  THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 
  CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION 
  WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 
  When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair 
  The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. 
  Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.” 
  On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. 
  "Suzette Mayr brings to life –believably, achingly, thrillingly –a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly one hundred years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate –and eerily contemporary. The sleeping car porter in this sleek, stylish novel is named R.T. Baxter –called George by the people upon whom he waits, as is every other Black porter. Baxter’s dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with his secret life as a gay man, and in Mayr’s triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but into and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters, and, finally, into a beautifully rendered radiance." – 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury

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  The Almanack

  Martine Bailey

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  The philosophy of time, destiny and the stars pervade this intricate historical mystery in which a young woman determines to avenge her mother's death.1752, Midsummer. Following a desperate summons from her mother, Tabitha Hart departs London for her home village of Netherlea – only to discover that her mother has drowned. Determined to discover the truth about the Widow Hart's death, Tabitha consults her almanack and uncovers a series of cryptic notes describing her mother's terror of someone she names only as ‘D'. Teaming up with young writer Nat Starling, Tabitha begins a race against time to unmask ‘D' before more deaths follow. But as the summer draws to a close and the snow sets in, cutting off Netherlea from the outside world, Tabitha and Nat are forced to face the darkest hours of their lives.“I was enthralled by the riddles and puzzles leading through many twists and surprises to a satisfying conclusion.” PAULA BRACKSTON

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  The River Within

  Karen Powell

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  It is the summer of 1955. Alexander, Tom, and his sister Lennie discover the body of their childhood friend Danny Masters in the river that runs through Starome, a village on the Richmond estate in North Yorkshire. His death is a mystery. Did he jump, or was it just an accident? Lady Venetia Richmond has no time to dwell on the death. Newly widowed, she is busy trying to keep the estate together, while struggling with death duties and crippling taxation. Alexander, her son and sole heir to Richmond Hall, is of little help. Just when she most needs him, he grows elusive, his behavior becoming increasingly erratic. Lennie Fairweather, "child of nature" and daughter of the late Sir Angus’s private secretary, has other things on her mind too. In love with Alexander, she longs to escape life with her over-protective father and domineering brother. Alexander is unpredictable though, hard to pin down. Can she be sure of his true feelings towards her? In the weeks that follow the tragic drowning, the river begins to give up its secrets. As the truth about Danny’s death emerges, other stories come to the surface that threaten to destroy everyone’s plans for the future and, ultimately, their very way of life.

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  The Spirit of American Literature

  John Albert Macy

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  THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE is a collection of essays reviewing contemporary authors on the literary scene at the turn of the century and assessing the uniquely American characteristics of their growing body of work. Excerpted from the author’s preface: “In this book something is said about most, if not quite all, of the emergent figures in American literature; an attempt is made to survey the four corners of the national library and to give an impression of its shape and size. If its purpose is approximately realized, this volume will be found to be a little nearer to a collection of appreciative essays than to a formal history or bibliographic manual. …To be sure, the historian avowedly and properly puts emphasis on writers who are dead in the flesh, and finishes off his contemporaries briefly because they are not yet established and are too numerous to mention. But it seems well, in books about literature, not to discuss writers admittedly dead in the spirit, whose names persist by the inertia of reputation...All that I wish to plead is that a living lion is better than a dead mouse...If, as I believe, accepted handbooks and histories of American literature pay too much attention to doubly dead worthies, whose books are not interesting, and miss or but timidly acknowledge contemporary excellence, there is a way of accounting for it.” (Summary by lubee930)

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  A Cold Touch of Ice

  Michael Pearce

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  The world is changing around the Mamur Zapt, British Chief of Cairo's Secret Police. It's 1912 and there's a war on that no one's heard of. When an Italian man is murdered in the city's back streets, there is concern that this could be some kind of ethnic cleansing. "One of us" Morelli may have been, but was he "one of us" enough? And were the guns in his warehouse anything to do with it? Gareth Owen - the Mamur Zapt - has to find out fast.And then, as external pressures crowd in, other difficult questions arise. What is Trudi von Ramsberg really doing in Cairo? Not to mention that other noted traveller, Gertrude Bell, or the irritating little archaeologist, T.E. Lawrence? And why has the post of Khedive's Librarian suddenly become so important?As Cromer's Egypt gives way to Kitchener's Egypt, Morelli is not the only one who has problems over where his allegiance lies. Maybe the solution is for Owen to go to Zanzibar....

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