Saturday Afternoon Showcase – $20

[gdlr_button href="https://www.artscommons.ca/WhatsOn/ShowDetails.aspx?show_id=A76FFE50-72AE-410C-8DA4-428830D8D889" target="_self" size="medium" background="#358CCB" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button] [gdlr_space height="20px"] There's nothing musty about these histories. All five of these new books are set in the past, but the craft is undeniably current and compelling. A selection of acclaimed writers representing a cross-section of historical fiction and non-fiction give short readings and discuss how their protagonists find courage and resolve in mind-boggling situations. Hosted by Emily Ursuliak. [gdlr_divider type="solid" size="100%" ]

Featured Books

Black Apple by Joan Crate

Black Apple is a dramatic and lyrical coming-of-age novel about a young Blackfoot girl who grows up in the residential school system on the Canadian prairies. Sinopaki lives with her Blackfoot family in the bush, far from civilization, until she is delivered to St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls by government decree. There, she finds herself in an alien universe. Set during and after the Second World War, Black Apple is about an irrepressible Blackfoot girl whose spirit is tested by an endless series of torments under the sharp eye of Mother Grace. All too soon her dreams warn her of unspoken dangers.

The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel by Katerine Govier

Katherine Govier's new novel begins in 1911 in Gateway, Alberta. The coming of the railroad to the Canadian Rockies has brought to the heavenly Bow Valley a parade of newcomers — climbers, coal miners, artists, scientists, runaway aristocrats and remittance men. Among them is the poacher Herbie Wishart, who arrived on a one-way ticket and has reinvented himself as a trail guide and teller of tall tales.

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War by Taras Grescoe

To understand what the world's going to be like tomorrow, you have to understand China today. And to understand today's China, you have to know what her greatest city — Shanghai — was like yesterday. Shanghai Grand is a passport to the International Settlement of the 1930s, a time when the foreign-controlled city was the crucible for all the ideologies — western colonialism and Chinese communism, authoritarianism and nationalism, free-market capitalism and globalization — that forged Asian history in the twentieth century, and whose legacy is making history in the twenty-first.

The Man Who Saved Henry Morgan by Robert Hough

The Sisters Brothers meets Master and Commander in Robert Hough’s rollicking and raucous new historical novel. The year is 1664, and Benny Wand, a young thief and board game hustler, is arrested in London for illegal gaming. Deported to the city of Port Royal, Jamaica — known as “the wickedest city on earth” — Wand is forced by his depleted circumstances to join a raid on the Spanish city of Villahermosa. [gdlr_divider type="solid" size="100%" ] [gdlr_button href="https://www.artscommons.ca/WhatsOn/ShowDetails.aspx?show_id=A76FFE50-72AE-410C-8DA4-428830D8D889" target="_self" size="medium" background="#358CCB" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button]