Lucienne Dora Eugene was living the ultimate charmed and rich life. A Paris trained couturier and a governess to the royal court living in Windsor Castle England her life was almost a fairy tale. Then a Canadian Sergeant of the Guards at Windsor Castle swept Lucienne off her feet and promised a life of romance and ease if she would come to Canada and marry him.Lucienne followed her intended lover, Lorne Ranson, to Winnipeg, Canada. Where she quickly found out that she had just marr...

The stories that became Paddling South, Winnipeg to New Orleans by Canoe stem from a voyage a high school friend and I took in the fall of 1969. Although there was a forty year wait between voyage and publication, the book retains its accuracy because both John Van Landeghem and I kept separate journals.While I was writing the book John lent me his diary so I was able to refer to both accounts. After forty years it was a revelation to see what John actually thought of the trip and ...

In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line.

Thousands of years ago an inland ocean covering Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Montana smashed through a mile high wall of ice and with a roar of constant thunder that could be heard for 200 miles the water exploded into the Arctic Ocean. Some scientist say that this was Noah's flood.That was then. This will happen.Freed of the crushing weight of the Everest of ice, the land is rising and slowly blocking all the rivers draining into Hudson Bay.Those lakes are...

Ask Bobby Orr who was the best ever, and he’ll tell you it was Gordie Howe. Ask Wayne Gretzky, and he’ll say the same thing. Big, skilled, mean, and nearly indestructible, Howe dominated the game and the record books for decades. Today he is still known as “Mr. Hockey,” and any bruising forward who can be relied upon to take his team on his shoulders hopes to be compared with the guy who wore number 9 for Detroit for so many years.But the fact is, there will never be another like M...

The bestselling popular science author " has made it his mission to tackle myths about science and the so-called experts who spread them" ( CBC Radio).The internet is a powerful beast when it comes to science; the answer to any query you may have is just a few keystrokes away. But when there are multiple answers from various sources, how do we know what information is reliable? In Monkeys, Myths, and Molecules, bestselling...

One of the greatest sports figures of all time at last breaks his silence in a memoir as unique as the man himself.Number 4. It is just about the most common number in hockey, but invoke that number and you can only be talking about one player -- the man often referred to as the greatest ever to play the game: Bobby Orr.From 1966 through the mid-70s he could change a game just by stepping on the ice. Orr could do things that others simply couldn’t, and while teammates and o...

Travel to space and back with astronaut Chris Hadfield's enthralling bestseller as your eye-opening guide."Hadfield proves himself to be not only a fierce explorer of the universe, but also a deeply thoughtful explorer of the human condition." —Maria Popova, Brain PickingsColonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into ...

Tell them, the Night Heron is hunting . . .A lone man escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British. Now he finds Beijing transformed and crawling with danger - the fugitive must quickly disappear on its surveillance-blanketed streets or face death.Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via journalist Philip Mangan, off...

From New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Lisa Genova comes a “heartbreaking…very human novel” (Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves) that does for Huntington’s disease what her debut novel Still Alice did for Alzheimer’s.Joe O’Brien is a forty-three-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and r...

#1 New York Times BestsellerAvailable in a special hardcover edition, Christina Baker Kline’s smash bestseller, a captivating historical novel that is “a lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history” (Ann Packer).Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of aband...

The Lost Child of Philomena Lee is the tale of a mother and a son whose lives were scarred by the forces of hypocrisy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the secrets they were forced to keep. A compelling narrative of human love and loss, Martin Sixsmith's moving account is both heartbreaking yet ultimately redemptive.When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary to be looked aft...