Simcoe Reads

What is Simcoe Reads?

7 Libraries. 7 Books. 1 Winner.

Seven libraries are bringing their communities together with Simcoe Reads, a cover-to-cover conversation for adults.

Each library has selected a local champion and book they believe everyone in Simcoe County should read.

You can:

BORROW all 7 books at each library.

READ all 7 books and pick your favourite!

ATTEND the grand finale conversation on October 19th at the Angus Recreation Centre to VOTE for your favourite to win.

FOLLOW the libraries on social media for events and updates and visit simcoereads.ca for more information.

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hayloft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

The internationally bestselling novel based on real events—by the award-winning author of All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.

Now a major motion picture starring Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley—adapted and directed by Sarah Polley.

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of eight bestselling novels:  Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Wrtiers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

How To Calm Your Mind – Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by CHris Bailey

How to Calm Your Mind is a toolkit of accessible, science-backed strategies that reveal that the path to a less anxious life, and even greater productivity, runs directly through calm.

CHRIS BAILEY has been intensively researching and experimenting with productivity since he was a young teenager, in an effort to discover how to become as productive as humanly possible. To date, he has written hundreds of articles on the subject, and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, GQ, Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company, and Lifehacker . The author of The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus, Bailey lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His blog is ALifeofProductivity.com.

Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez

Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone

CATHERINE HERNANDEZ (she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript; was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award; and a finalist for Canada Reads 2022. Hernandez has also written a number of critically acclaimed plays and children’s books.

The Maid by Nita Prose

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.

NITA PROSE is a writer and longtime editor. The Maid, her debut novel, was a #1 New York Times and national bestseller, and a Good Morning America Book Club Pick. Winner of both the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction and a Goodreads Choice Award, and shortlisted for an Edgar Award for Best Novel, The Maid has been published in over forty countries in more than thirty-five languages. Nita lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house that is moderately clean. She would love to hear from you at nitaprose.com or on Twitter and Instagram: @NitaProse.

On the Ravine by Vincent Lam

From the bestselling, Giller Prize-winning author comes an exquisitely crafted novel, piercing in its urgency and breathtaking in its intimacy, about the devastating experience of addiction.

VINCENT LAM’s first book, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. The Headmaster’s Wager, Dr. Lam’s first novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award and the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize. Dr. Lam is also the co-author of The Flu Pandemic and You, a non-fiction guide to influenza pandemics, which received a Special Recognition Award by the American Medical Writers’ Association in 2007. He served as executive editor and co-author of the textbook, Opioid Agonist Therapy: A Prescriber’s Guide to Treatment, published in 2022. In 2011, he published a biography of Tommy Douglas, “father of medicare,” for Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians Series. Dr. Lam is an emergency physician and addictions physician who lives in Toronto. He is the medical director of the Coderix Medical Clinic.

Breast Cancer – After the Diagnosis: One Woman’s Story of Overcoming Setbacks by Jayne Pritchard

Jayne’s book, ‘Breast Cancer After The Diagnosis‘, shares what she went through over a three-year period of emotional ups and downs, including several setbacks. It includes the alternative therapies that Jayne sought out, important supplements that boost the immune system, her Top 10 Health and Wellness Tips, as well as amazing stories that will expand people’s minds and give comfort to those who have lost a loved one.

JAYNE PRiTCHARD spent nearly forty years in broadcasting at CTV Barrie. She’s a breast cancer survivor, Registered Nutritional Counsellor and Reiki Master. ​Jayne is now focusing her time and energy on promoting health and wellness through engaging and informative public speaking events, workshops large and small, and one-on-one counselling.

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A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny

It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.  But something has.

LOUISE PENNY CM OQ is a Canadian author of mystery novels set in the Canadian province of Quebec centred on the work of francophone Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Penny’s first career was as a radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). After she turned to writing, she won numerous awards for her work, including the Agatha Award for best mystery novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2007–2010), and the Anthony Award for best novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2010–2013). Her novels have been published in 23 languages.

Krista White

Krista is a former executive recruiter who fell so hard for writing, stories soon consumed her every idle thought. Relationships fascinate her. Marital, romantic, familial, professional—as long as they’re ripe with complexity and emotion—she’ll be writing them. Krista is the 2022 winner of Simcoe Reads and serves as the Women’s Fiction Writers Association’s Volunteer Coordinator. Last year her novella The Birdcage was published by Saga Fiction.

Simcoe Reads Cover-to-Cover Conversation

The Grand Finale Cover to Cover Conversation was held at the Innisfil IdeaLab & Library on Saturday, September 17th.

New Tecumseth Public Library

What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an award winning, international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. What Strange Paradise is also a multi-award winning novel, including winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.

Barrie Public Library

Can You Hear Me Now? by Celina Caesar-Chavannes

Celina Caesar-Chavannes digs deep into her childhood and her life as a young Black woman entrepreneur and politician, and shows us that effective and humane leaders grow as much from their mistakes and vulnerabilities as from their strengths.

CELINA CAESAR-CHAVANNES C is an equity and inclusion advocate and leadership consultant, and a former Member of Parliament who served as parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and to the Minister of International Development et la Francophonie. During her political career, Celina advocated for people suffering with mental illness and was given the Champion of Mental Health Parliamentarian Award in May 2017 by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health. That year she was also named one of the Global 100 Under 40 Most Influential People of African Descent (Politics & Governance category) and Black Parliamentarian of the Year. After she stepped away from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent member in 2019, Celina was picked as one of Chatelaine Magazine ‘s Women of the Year. Before entering politics, she was a successful entrepreneur, launching and growing an award-winning research management consulting firm, with a particular focus on neurological conditions. Celina was the recipient of both the Toronto Board of Trade’s Business Entrepreneur of the Year for 2012 and the 2007 Black Business and Professional Association’s Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award. Celina holds an MBA in Healthcare Management from the University of Phoenix as well as an Executive MBA from the Rotman School of Management. She is currently enrolled in a PhD program focused on organizational leadership at Northcentral University. She lives in Whitby, Ontario, with her three children, and her husband, Dr. Vidal Chavannes.

Bradford-West Gwillimbury Public Library

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

A novel of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption follows a young woman as she discovers that the greatest superpower–for good or evil–is a properly executed spreadsheet.

NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS is a freelance writer, community manager and bailed academic based in Toronto. She writes everything from reviews of science fiction novels and interviews with heavy metal musicians to to in-depth feminist games criticism and pieces of long-form journalism. She is the author of two books of poetry. In her free time she has been exploring the poetic potential of the notes engine in the video game Bloodborne, writing a collection of polyamorous fairytales, developing interactive narrative classes and composing short text-based body horror games. She also plays a lot of D&D, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction.

Essa Public Library

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

When two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, they bring with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black — an eleven year-old field slave — is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But the man is not as Washington expects him to be. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde — naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist — whose obsession to perfect a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him. Washington is initiated into a world of wonder: a world where the night sea is set alight with fields of jellyfish, where a simple cloth canopy can propel a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning — and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed one fateful night, Washington is left to the mercy of his new masters.

ESI EDUGYAN  A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, Esi Edugyan was raised in Calgary, Alberta. She is also the author of Half-Blood Blues, Dreaming of Elsewhere, and Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust, and Man Booker Prizes, and won the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Innisfil IdeaLab and Library

Not On My Watch by Alexandra Morton

In 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into British Columbia, chasing away the whales Alexandra Morton had dedicated her life to studying. Her fisherman neighbours asked her if she would write letters on their behalf to the government explaining the damage the farms were doing to the fisheries, and one thing led to another. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast. Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising that built around her as ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn’t obey their own court rulings.

ALEXANDRA MORTON is a field biologist turned activist who has done groundbreaking research on the damaging impact of ocean-based salmon farming on the coast of British Columbia. She first studied communications in bottlenosed dolphins and then the sounds of captive orcas at Marineland of the Pacific in California. She then moved to the remote BC coast and found herself at the heart of a long fight to protect the wild salmon that are the province’s keystone species. She has co-authored more than twenty scientific papers on the impact of salmon farming on migratory salmon, and her book Not on My Watch is a national bestseller.

Midland Public Library

The Last High by Daniel Kalla

A Vancouver doctor and a detective face the deadly consequences of the opioid crisis as they track down the supplier of fentanyl that landed a group of teens in the ER with critical overdoses.

DANIEL KALLA  is an internationally bestselling author of novels, including The Darkness in the Light, Lost Immunity, The Last High, and We All Fall Down. Kalla practices emergency medicine in Vancouver, British Columbia. Visit him at DanielKalla.com or follow him on Twitter @DanielKalla.

Ramara Public Library

The Forgotten Home Child by Genevieve Graham

The Forgotten Home Child brings to the foreground a lost part of Canadian history — the children that were brought from British orphanages to Canada in order to have better opportunities in life. While the concept was great in theory, the reality was often gruesome for the children. This story follows 5 children from Barnardo’s Homes in London who were brought to Canada in the 1930s and placed into family homes across Ontario. Decades later, 97-year-old Winny has to confront the horrors of her past when her relatives ask her about a mysterious old trunk.

GENEVIEVE GRAHAM is prolific and determined, dedicated to bringing Canadian history to life through the popular, mainstream market of commercial historical fiction. Having started writing relatively late in life (in her forties), she has already published five novels with Simon & Schuster Canada in five years, and is eager to keep on that same track for years to come.

Simcoe Reads 2022 MC: Emily Nakeff

Emily Nakeff (she/her) is the editor of the Borden Citizen, a Canadian Forces Newspaper serving Base Borden and the surrounding communities. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ottawa, and a diploma in print and broadcast journalism from Durham College, but her passion for storytelling stemmed from a love of reading. She lives locally with her husband and a dog who is too smart for his own good.

Simcoe Reads Debate and Voting

The Debate aired October 3 and 10, and voting closed October 12, but you can still watch the Debate online now.

New Tecumseth Public Library

Greenwood by Michael Christie

From the award-winning author Michael Christie comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years.  An ingenious nested-ring, multigenerational epic, set against the devastation of the natural world.

MICHAEL CHRISTIE is the author of the novel If I Fall, If I Die, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick, and was on numerous best-of 2015 lists. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar’s Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Globe & Mail.

Greenwood, his most recent novel, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Rights have been sold in seven countries.

A former carpenter and homeless shelter worker, he divides his time between Victoria, British Columbia, and Galiano Island, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber frame house that he built himself.

Barrie Public Library

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism.

ALICIA ELLIOTT  is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, Room, Grain, CBC, The Globe and Mail, and Maclean’s, among others. She is currently creative nonfiction editor at The Fiddlehead, associate nonfiction editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly. Her essay A Mind Spread Out on the Ground won Gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017. Elliott lives in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child.

Bradford-West Gwillimbury Public Library

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices and who dresses like he belongs in the seventh century.

When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself

Essa Public Library

Gutter Child by Jael Richardson

Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter.

Innisfil IdeaLab and Library

The Company We Keep by Frances Itani

It’s been three years since Hazzley’s husband died but she is still struggling to cope. After some persuasion from her longtime friend, Hazzley decides to start a conversation group. The group quickly grows to include six strangers who meet in the back room of Cassie’s cafe weekly, each with their own unique stories to tell. The strangers find comfort and good company in this touching yet funny novel.

Midland Public Library

The Centaur’s Wife by Amanda Leduc

Amanda Leduc’s The Centaur’s Wife is a magic realist novel that imagines what it means for us, and our world, to be broken, changed, and grieving…and to be resilient, sufficient, and bound together.

Rama Public Library

Indians on Vacation by Thomas King

Inspired by a handful of postcards sent nearly a hundred years ago, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace long-lost uncle Leroy and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.

Simcoe Reads 2021 MC

Lisa Morgan

Lisa Morgan is the Midday host at 107.5 KOOLFM in Barrie. An avid reader, some of her earliest memories involve visiting the library for story time and to borrow books to pass the long summer days.   After winning last year’s inaugural event, Lisa is excited to be hosting Simcoe Reads this year.