Book Club
Join the Fairfield Community Book Club
Monday, May 9
7:00-9ish pm
Meeting in-person @ Fairfield Community Place
Contact: event@fairfieldcommunity.ca for information on joining the Community Book Club.
Join our skilled volunteer facilitators as they guide participants to deepen their understanding of the issues each book presents.
What kind of books do we read?
- NEW for 2019-2020, as of July 29, 2019: Speaks—whether through fiction, science fiction or non-fiction—to a critical global issue that is affecting us now as Canadians. Provided the book meets this criterion, it may be by an author from any country.
- Contributes to (deepens and expands) our cultural understanding of this country: First Nations and Metis experiences, the diaspora from many countries, other immigrants and their descendants, other often-marginalized voices in our country
- Principally, though not solely, works of fiction written by a Canadian author
- Global issues
- Rooted in social history, preferentially, meaning works richly based on an author’s lived experience (e.g. works by First Nations or Metis authors vs. books about FN or Metis culture—also without intention to read only books that are by FN and/or Metis authors)
- Ability to access the book through multiple media (e.g., paper, eBook, audio book) and at various price points (e.g., library copies, used, paperback, hardcover)
Note: The criteria are as dynamic as our book club—and open for amendment. We encourage you to bring any books you believe are suitable!
Reading options before the event
To read the book before the meeting, there are different options available: borrow from the library or the FGCA or purchase. To reduce the impact on the environment, we prioritize books that are available at the library. You can also borrow the current and next month’s book from the community centre. After each meeting, Erin we will email the next month’s book selection and you will have the opportunity to reserve a copy of the book. You will have one week to read it before the next person on the waiting list picks it up.
Note we keep all book selections and you are welcome to borrow at anytime!
Upcoming Book Selections
The Relatives by Camilla Gibb
Meeting: May 9
Lila is on a long, painful journey toward motherhood. Tess and Emily are reeling after their ugly separation and fighting over ownership of the embryos that were supposed to grow their family together. And thousands of miles away, the unknown man who served as anonymous donor to them all is being held in captivity in Somalia. While his life remains in precarious balance, his genetic material is a source of both creation and conflict.
What does it mean to be a family in our rapidly shifting world? What are our responsibilities to each other with increasing options for how to create a family?
As these characters grapple with life-altering changes, they will find themselves interconnected in ways they cannot have imagined, and forced to redefine what family means to them.
The Strangers Katherena Vermette
Meeting: June 27
Cedar has nearly forgotten what her family looks like. Phoenix has nearly forgotten what freedom feels like. And Elsie has nearly given up hope. Nearly.
After time spent in foster homes, Cedar goes to live with her estranged father. Although she grapples with the pain of being separated from her mother, Elsie, and sister, Phoenix, she’s hoping for a new chapter in her life, only to find herself once again in a strange house surrounded by strangers. From a youth detention centre, Phoenix gives birth to a baby she’ll never get to raise and tries to forgive herself for all the harm she’s caused (while wondering if she even should). Elsie, struggling with addiction and determined to turn her life around, is buoyed by the idea of being reunited with her daughters and strives to be someone they can depend on, unlike her own distant mother. These are the Strangers, each haunted in her own way. Between flickering moments of warmth and support, the women diverge and reconnect, fighting to survive in a fractured system that pretends to offer success but expects them to fail. Facing the distinct blade of racism from those they trusted most, they urge one another to move through the darkness, all the while wondering if they’ll ever emerge safely on the other side.
A breathtaking companion to her bestselling debut The Break, Vermette’s The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
Previous Book Selections
March 2022 I On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Meeting: March 28
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
February 2022 I What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
Meeting: February 28
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vanna. Vanna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vanna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair–and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
March 2022 I On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
January 2022 I Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Meeting: January 31
Winner of the 2018 HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, told from the alternating points of view of five former residential school students as they struggle to survive in 1960s Vancouver—one finding her way into the dangerous world of the American Indian movement; one finding unexpected strength in motherhood; and one unable to escape his demons – and the bonds of friendship that sustain them, inspired by the author’s experiences.
2021 Book Selections
How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Indians on Vacation by Thomas King
We Two Alone by Jack Wang
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
From the Ashes, My story of being Métis, Homeless and Finding My Way by Jesse Thristle
Chop Suey Nation, The Legion Café and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants by Ann Hui
The Silence by Karen Lee White
Little Fish by Casey Plett
Earle Street by Arleene Pare
Ragged Company by Richard Wagamese
The Testament by Margaret Atwood
2020 Book Selections
Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson
Black Writers Matter, an anthology of Canadian (black) writers, edited by Whitney French
Translated from the Gibberish by Anosh Irani
The Book of Negroes by Laurence Hill
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
A Mind Spread on the Ground by Alicia Elliot
Noopiming, The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
2019 Book Selections
This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir by Elizabeth Hay
The Measure of My Powers by Jackie Kai Ellis
A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto
Homes: A Refugee Story by Abu Bakr Al Rabeeah
The Dark and Other Love Stories by Deborah Willis
Love From A to Z by SK Ali
Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote
A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage By Bill Gaston
Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age By Darrel J. McLeod
2018 Book Selections
Next Year, For Sure by Zoey Leigh Peterson
Bad Endings: Stories by Carleigh Baker
Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson
Brother by David Chairandy
Where I Live Now by Sharon Butala
The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill
One Day We’ll All be Dead and None of this Will Matter by Scaachi Koul
Nostalgia by MG Vassanji
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
A Hero’s Walk by Anita Rau Badami