My summer readings

David Slaney has escaped from prison, and now he must make good on the heist that went wrong and win back the woman he loves. Here are bravado and betrayal, bad weather and seas, love, undercover agents, the collusion of governments, unbridled ambition, innocence and the loss thereof, and many, many bales of marijuana. Here, too, is the seeming invincibility of youth and all the folly that it allows.

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox and is pulled into Nao's drama and her unknown fate. (Bestseller)

Author Iain Reid learns important life lessons from his ninety-two-year old grandmother.

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty. Their friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become, and the shapes their lives have taken. (Bestseller)

Shivan Rassiah, a Canadian man in his early thirties, prepares to leave his home in Toronto to visit his dying grandmother in Sri Lanka. Much is riding on this trip for Shivan, who hopes it will bring the renewal he so desperately needs.

A family drama unlike any other from the internationally acclaimed author of All My Friends are Superheroes. The Weirds have always been a little peculiar, but not one of them suspected that they'd been cursed by their grandmother. At the moment of their birth Annie Weird gave each of her five grandchildren a special power that she thought was a blessing. Richard, the oldest, always keeps safe; Abba always has hope; Lucy is never lost and Kent can beat anyone in a fight. As for Angie, she always forgives, instantly. But over the years these blessings have proved to be curses and ruined their lives. Now Annie is dying and she has one last task for Angie, her favourite grandchild. Angie has to gather her far-flung brothers and sisters and assemble them in her Grandmother's hospital room so that at the moment of her death, she can lift these blessings turned curses.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right? On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war. Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?

When sisters Beena and Sadhana are orphaned as teenagers and sent to live with their Sikh uncle in Montreal's Hasidic community, their lives take divergent courses as they deal with their grief in different ways.