As announced today, the current lockdown will continue for several more weeks. As far as we can gather at this time, we will still be able to offer curbside pickup service and delivery. We will continue to monitor the situation and seek clarification of rules for small independent retailers.
HOWEVER… We encourage you to stay at home as much as possible. If you have placed an order or are considering placing one, we will hold those books until you are comfortable enough to come to the store to pick them up or we can arrange delivery.
We will be working with a skeleton staff at the store, accepting and processing orders and answering phones. We assume that we will be able to do deliveries but, given our current costs, that delivery charge will rise to a flat $10 throughout the city and will rise to current postal rates for outside the city.
Place your order on line or by telephone. Specify whether you are picking up or wishing delivery.
Wait for us to call, text or email you that your book has arrived
Pay online with your order or we can bring a card machine outside to pay at our door
Knock on our window or door when you arrive. There’s always someone close by.
We will be “open” for business from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and closed on Sundays
You can be assured that we will get books to you one way or the other while still adhering to the letter and the spirit of the Provincial mandate.
Some of you have noted that the store next to us has become vacant. The new occupant will be us!! Yes, after several years of solid growth, we are expanding our floor space and doing a very extensive renovation. What better time to do this than in the middle of a Pandemic and a lockdown! We’re aiming for a grand-ish re-opening after this lockdown lifts sometime in May.
Thanks to all of you for supporting us throughout this tumultuous year and especially at Christmas. We set new heights for Christmas sales thanks to your determination to shop locally. I want to iterate that Perfect Books is in great shape and we will withstand these temporary obstacles and bounce back as healthy as ever when this clouds passes. We’re going to be here to serve this community for many, many years to come.
Hamish Hamilton – $29.95
From the internationally bestselling and Giller-shortlisted author of The Disappeared, an astounding, poetic novel about war and loss, suffering and courage, and the strength of women through it all.
It’s been eleven years since Gota has seen Kosmos, yet she still finds herself fantasizing about their intimate year together in Paris. Now it’s 1999 and, working as a journalist, she hears about a film festival in Sarajevo, where she knows Kosmos will be with his theatre company. She takes the assignment to investigate the fallout of the Bosnian war—and to reconnect with the love of her life.
But when they are reunited, she finds a man, and a country, altered beyond recognition. Kosmos introduces Gota to Edina, the woman he has always loved. While Gota treads the precarious terrain of her evolving connection to Kosmos, she and Edina forge an unexpected bond. A lawyer and a force to be reckoned with, Edina exposes the sexual violence that she and thousands of others survived in the war. Before long, Gota finds her life entwined with the community of women and travels with them to The Hague to confront their abusers. The events she covers—and the stories she hears—will change her
life forever.
Written in Kim Echlin’s masterfully luminescent prose, Speak, Silence weaves together the experiences of a resilient sisterhood and tells the story of the real-life trial that would come to shape history. In a heart-wrenching tale of suffering and loss and a beautiful illustration of power and love, Echlin explores what it means to speak out against the very people who would do anything to silence you.
Doubleday – $29.95
From the renowned author of Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement and This Is Happy, comes a bold, urgent and richly imagined novel about what it means to be a family in our modern world.
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.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – $38.00
A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home
The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father’s recent death, Idris, the family’s new patriarch, has decided to sell.
The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.
In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).
Douglas & McIntyre – $29.95
Mamaskatch, Darrel J. McLeod’s 2018 memoir of growing up Cree in Northern Alberta, was a publishing sensation—winning the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, shortlisted for many other major prizes and translated into French and German editions. In Peyakow, McLeod continues the poignant story of his impoverished youth, beset by constant fears of being dragged down by the self-destruction and deaths of those closest to him as he battles the bullying of white classmates, copes with the trauma of physical and sexual abuse, and endures painful separation from his family and culture. With steely determination, he triumphs: now elementary teacher; now school principal; now head of an Indigenous delegation to the UN in Geneva; now executive in the Government of Canada—and now a celebrated author.
Brutally frank but buoyed throughout by McLeod’s unquenchable spirit, Peyakow—a title borrowed from the Cree word for “one who walks alone”—is an inspiring account of triumph against unimaginable odds. McLeod’s perspective as someone whose career path has crossed both sides of the Indigenous/white chasm resonates with particular force in today’s Canada.
Doubleday – $39.95
From the bestselling author of Londoners, an epic portrait of today’s New York told through the boisterous voices and true stories of its people.
Ten years in the making, New Yorkers is a compulsively readable portrait of New York that is as lively and vibrant as the city itself. Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor ventured into nearly every corner of the city, getting some of its best talkers–rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant–to share indelible tales about New York in our time.
Here are a blind man on navigating the city by smell, a rapper on the sound of New York, a cop on the long aftermath of 9/11, and a boxer on first entering Madison Square Garden. Here are the voices of the people who make the city go: a subway conductor, a window-washer on Rockefeller Center, and an electrician who keeps the lights on at the top of the Empire State Building. And here are unforgettable glimpses of the city, including the Statue of Liberty as seen by one of its security guards, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from a balloon handler, the Marathon from a runner through all five boroughs, and Christmas in New York as seen by a Salvation Army bell-ringer on 42nd and Fifth.
New Yorkers is a symphony of the city that dares call itself the greatest in the world.
Knopf – $40.00
An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history.
In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were “tame and inquisitive . . . quarrelsome and passionate,” and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story, but he set this mystery aside and never returned to it.
Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they’re very rare. He reveals the wild, fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures. And along the way, he draws us into the life and work of William Henry Hudson, the Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as an unsung wonder of the natural world, and to falconry parks in the English countryside, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory and problem-solving. A Most Remarkable Creature is a hybrid of science writing, travelogue, and biography, as generous and accessible as it is sophisticated, and absolutely riveting.