Consider a trip to the beautiful village of Wakefield on May 28th to honour the memory and the immense talent of Steven Heighton. Featured will be Steven’s final work, Instructions for the Drowning, and several prominent writers from the Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec communities will be there to reflect and embrace Steven’s contribution to the world of letters. Contact the Festival for details and tickets. Follow this link
We have (finally) switched over to paper bags. It’s something we’ve been anxious to do for some time but we’re finally there. This is a very costly move for us but we believe it’s the right thing to do. Paper bags are many times the cost of plastic.
Please help us out by bringing your own bag to the store whenever you visit.
May 10th from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Perfect Books welcomes to the store Michelle Brown with her new book of poetry entitled Safe Words. Joining Michelle will be Jake Byrne with a new volume entitled Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin. Joining Michelle and Jake will be Bardia Sinaee and Ben Ladouceur
Saturday, May 13th will see a busy book evening on Elgin Street. At 5 p.m. we will be at The Manx Pub to provide books for Anita Lahey’s launch of her latest volume of poetry, While Supplies Last. At 6 p.m., we welcome Kai Thomas to the store as he presents his newest novel, In the Upper Country. This event will run from 6 to 8 p.m. and will be hosted by Adrian Harewood. Finally, at 7 p.m., we will be at St. John The Evangelist Church (Elgin at Somerset) to provide books for an Ottawa Writers Festival event featuring R.F. Kuang with her much anticipated new release entitled Yellowface. Tickets for this event are available from the Ottawa Writers Festival website.
Tuesday, May 16th is a special event in the Ottawa poetry community. We’ll be at the SAW Gallery to help celebrate ARC Poetry’s 100th issue. Poets who will be reading that evening will be Frances Boyle, Sadiqa de Meijer, Katia Grubisic, rob mcclennan and Brandon Wint. The event begins at 6:30
Wednesday, May 17th from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Perfect Books will welcome Huda Mukbil with her new work entitled Agent of Change detailing her many years in counter-terrorism work with CSIS from a unique perspective.
Sunday, May 21st from 1 – 3 p.m. we welcome Helen Power to our shop with her new novel, a thriller entitled The Ghosts of Thorwald Place.
Tuesday, May 23rd from 6:30 to 8 p.m. we will welcome James Brooke-Smith with his new work entitled The Nineties, a retrospective of a fascinating decade.
Wednesday May 24th, Saturday May 27th and Sunday May 28th Perfect Books will be in the beautiful town of Wakefield to provide books for the Wakefield Writers Festival. Elizabeth Hay, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Tomson Highway are the featured authors. The festival will also honour the memory of Steven Heighton in a special session on Sunday.
Thursday, May 25th will see Brooke Lockyer his new novel, Burr) and Catriona Wright (her new poetry collection Table Manners) at our store for a rare Thursday evening event. the event begins at 6:30
Take a deep dive (and an inexpensive one at that) into our wonderful collection of classic literature in the form of the iconic Penguin Blacks. Revisit Dickens, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Austen, Bronte… the list goes on and on
When shopping on our website, go to the browsing function on the left side of your screen. Select “What’s in Store” and then select the Subject. Because we can’t promise that new orders will arrive by the 24th, this feature will help you narrow your search and confirm that we have stock in the book(s) you’re seeking.
… is optional now. Some of our staff and customers are continuing to mask up. This is now a personal choice which we respect.
We always have a few on hand and they’re free so please join with us in keeping EVERYBODY healthy for the long term
Thanks
• Click on the “Shop” icon on the top left of this page
• When the next page opens, select “Gift Cards” from the green bar near the top of the page
• Select “Add to Cart”, the select “Go to Cart”
• In the box that says “Cost”, enter the dollar value you wish
• At this point you can personalize the card (see the box on the left)
• When finished, click on the box at the bottom of the page which will take you to a login screen
• There you can create an account or log in to your existing account
• You will then proceed to checkout where you have two options
• We can hold the card at the store for pickup OR we can mail it to the recipient you choose
• Note that you are automatically charged for shipping but we waive that if the card is being mailed locally
Monday 10 to 6
Tuesday 10 to 6
Wednesday 10 to 6
Thursday 10 to 8
Friday 10 to 8
Saturday 10 to 6
Sunday 11 to 5
Closed on all statutory holidays
Please ignore the misinformation that is appearing on Google. This is where our correct hours are posted.
Thanks to all of you for supporting us throughout the past few years. After two years of Elgin Street reconstruction and ongoing threats of Covid we continue to grow, thanks to you! The proof is in the beautiful new shop. New floors, new lighting, new shelves and the same great service. We look forward to showing off our new look to you. See you soon!
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.