Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him. Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised. Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.

Hunt, an ex-convict, has spent the past twenty years on a small ranch with his wife, supplementing his income with the odd drug smuggling job. Drake, a deputy sheriff, is newly married and has almost escaped the shadow of his father, who was also a sheriff -- and no stranger to the drug trade himself... Drake is on Hunt's trail when a big drug deal in the mountains goes awry and so begins a terrifying race against time. Although Hunt evades Drake's attempts at capture the traffickers soon unleash a merciless hired killer to reclaim what's theirs. As the chase closes in and loyalties are tested, Drake's quest for justice contends with a hitman's quest for blood, and Hunt must face a terrible choice...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] established James Joyce as a leading figure in literary modernism across Europe. The novel is set in the author’s homeland, Ireland, and narrates, in five episodes, the childhood of Stephen Dedalus. The plot is entirely based on Joyce’s own life and serves as a private manifesto, particularly through its sharp declaration of independence from Catholicism. Joyce pioneered a new way of writing novels, abandoning traditional narration for stream of consciousness and introducing his epiphanies—momentary revelations that, in their everydayness, hint at a larger context of life. Upon the recommendation of the American poet Ezra Pound, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized in the magazine The Egoist in 1914/15 before being published as a book the following year. Today, more than a hundred years after its release, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is considered one of the most significant autobiographical texts in world literature. The Modern Library ranked it as the 3rd best English-language novel of the 20th century (with Joyce’s Ulysses as #1). JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].