Rare Machines – serie

Finalist for 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction • Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First BookAfter years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell.Persephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency.It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A meditation on the meaning of life in an increasingly global world, from acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Xue Yiwei.Set in modern-day Montreal, Celia, Misoka, I is the story of a middle-aged Chinese man who has been living in the city for fifteen years. After the death of his wife, he begins to reflect on his past and how he has ended up alone in Canada, a solitary member of the Chinese diaspora. It is in this period of angst and uncertainty, during the most unusual of winters, that he meets two women by Beaver Lake, on Montreal’s Mount Royal. They, too, have their own stories: stories of their own personal plights, which connect present to past, and West to East.The distinct paths taken by these three characters — Celia, Misoka, and “I” — span continents and decades, but, whether by chance or design, converge in Montreal, like mysterious figures in an ancient Chinese Zen painting. After coming together, the three begin to examine who they are, where they might belong, and how to navigate otherness and identity in a globalized world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the superrich.It's 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness “wakes up” in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian.Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her, learning about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse.Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt — the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library).Finalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First NovelSeven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them.The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness.Both sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

For readers of Queenie and Honey Girl, a coming-of-age story about queer Black identity, love, passion, chosen family, and rediscovering life’s pleasures after loss.Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister.Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life’s most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present. On the journey to turning twenty-five, she finally sees that she belongs to herself, and goes about the business of reclaiming that self. Through a series of whirlwind love affairs, parties, and trips abroad, Jade stumbles toward relinquishing the weight of her trauma as she fully comes into her own as a young Black woman and writer.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

A mid-level drug trafficker and self-proclaimed low-life with a big vocabulary comes to terms with his actions and his mental health.Andrew Brobyn’s relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents’ home in Toronto while he figured out what to do with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer.Equal parts hilarious and terrifying, Babble On is a psycho-philosophical memoir that tracks Brobyn as he navigates the consequences of his eccentric choices and struggles with profound ambivalence toward his own health and well-being.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

“At once experimental literature and alchemical apparatus — designed to take all the flavours of one man’s life experiences and transform them into something that nourishes.” — ANDREA THOMPSON, author of A Selected History of Soul SpeakA tasty yet experimental recipe of creative memoir in poetic prose cooked up for your consumption — one letter at a time.Alphabet Soup is a poetic exploration of the deeper meaning discovered by stirring up the depths of one’s most personal lived experiences. Twenty-six letters, one missive addressed to each letter of the alphabet, dive into the scalding heat of memory through themes that recall and reframe love, death, joy, sorrow, victory, devastation, and more.Using prose that is by turns startling, revelatory, humorous, sorrowful, and triumphant, these introspections on the nature of living engage the mind and heart in the difficult, unending work of grappling with one’s past in the present, with the hope it can help create a more satisfying future.

An anarchist online group sets out to assassinate the corporate elites they believe have turned culture into a digital nightmare.Don Barton is the visionary creator of Greenhouse, a popular immersive game where millions play at “saving the environment” in the surreal digital landscapes of the metaverse. Now retired to his plutocratic wealth, he learns his teen son, a gifted gamer, has suddenly gone missing, having joined a terrorist group led by a mysterious young woman, Eris, a former cryptocurrency trader. She’s on a mission to destroy the world’s entertainment and social media platforms and assassinate the corporate elites who run them.In desperation, Barton roams Greenhouse, the only place his radicalized son will talk to him, learning that the game — his life’s work — is on the terrorist hit list. And both his life and his son’s are in danger.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Gosia feels stalled in her life, but a family trip opens her eyes to the life she has … and the life she wants.Gosia, a high school chemistry teacher, travels to her native Poland to visit her estranged father. Back in Canada, meanwhile, her father-in-law — who has been more of a dad to her than her own — is dying of cancer. Away from her routine, Gosia questions everything in her life, including her long-term boyfriend, Peter. She feels stuck in the terrifying time of early adulthood, in her first grown-up job while managing student debt, monogamy, and existential dread. Is this really it, she wonders? Gosia’s time in Poland gives her the chance to examine her life, and she finds herself pulled homeward to Canada, where she faces the fact that Peter’s father — like her own — is far from perfect. Can she love despite betrayal? Can she find hope in her fiery, complex love for Peter? Is there something more to this life that she didn’t even realize she had?Becalming tells the story of two people realizing that happily ever after is not something to be but something to continue to explore, through adversity and outrage, tragedy and inspiration, and love.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change.With the world’s oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed.Stories of Émeraude’s ancestors — a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak — weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before.A RARE MACHINES BOOK