A morning of exploring nature with esteemed interpretive biologist and noted birding expert Chris Earley from the University of Guelph.

Start your day walking the Barton Trail with Chris and the folks from North Durham Nature, learning from the bird feeders in situ.  End at Blue Heron Studio for an informative talk and book signing

9:00 am          Meet at the parking lot of Herrema Soccer Fields
10:30 am         Blue Heron Studio talk
11:30 am          Refreshments, book signing

Tickets are $5 per person (children are welcome and FREE)

Your $5 ticket becomes a coupon toward your book purchase at Blue Heron Books that day

Sunday April 5, join us for brunch with award–winning journalist Katrina Onstad.

Katrina Onstad is a multiple award–winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian and Elle. Her critically lauded novels include How Happy to Be and Everybody Has Everything, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. 

In her new novel, Stay Where I Can See You, The Kaplan family has just won 10 million dollars in the lottery. But haven’t they always been lucky? Gwen thought so. She’s carefully curated a perfect suburban existence with a loving husband and two children. For over a decade, she’s been a stay-at-home mom, devoted to giving her kids the quiet, protected adolescence she didn’t have. But the surprise windfall suddenly upends the family, allowing them all to dream a little bigger and catapulting them back to the city that Gwen fled years ago.

As the Kaplans navigate the notoriety that the lottery brings and try to adjust to their new lives in the upper class—Seth launches a dubious start-up, Maddie falls headfirst in love at her elite prep school—a tightly held secret is unlocked. Along with the truth come long-buried memories from Gwen’s troubled youth, forcing her to confront her painful past and threatening to unravel the incredibly tight bond between her and Maddie. Her meticulously constructed identity as the good wife and mother begins to crack. And when their changed circumstances place her family under threat, Gwen must wake up from her domestic slumber.

Tickets are $25(+HST) and are available in-store or by calling 905-852-4282

This event will be hosted at Wooden Sticks in Uxbridge and will include a full brunch in the ticket price. 

(Or as part of our Spring 2020 Passport of Literary Events. See full passport roster here)
 

Sunday April 19, join us for brunch with Janet Somerville & Catherine Gildner.

Janet Somerville taught literature for 20 years in Toronto. Since 2015, she has been wholly immersed in Martha Gellhorn's life and words, privileged to have ongoing access to Gellhorn's restricted papers in Boston, Massachusetts.

Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville's biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn's life... An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn's reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.
--Kirkus, July 08, 2019

Catherine Gildiner has been a clinical psychologist in private practice for twenty-five years. Her bestselling memoir Too Close to the Falls was published in Canada, the US, and the UK to wide acclaim in 1999. It had two sequels: After the Falls and Coming Ashore, also bestsellers. Her novel, Seduction, was a national bestseller. 

In Good Morning Monster, a therapist creates moving portraits of five of her most memorable patients, men and women she considers psychological heroes.

The five cases include a successful but lonely musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman whose father abandoned her and her siblings in a rural cottage; an Indigenous man who'd endured great trauma at a residential school; a young woman whose abuse at the hands of her father led to a severe personality disorder; and a glamorous workaholic whose negligent mother had greeted her each morning with "Good morning, Monster."

Tickets are $25(+HST) and are available in-store or by calling 905-852-4282

This event will be hosted at Wooden Sticks in Uxbridge and will include a full brunch in the ticket price. 

(Or as part of our Spring 2020 Passport of Literary Events. See full passport roster here)
 

April 25th is Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. We will be celebrating with a host of activities in-store. We hope you will join us!

Chime in with Carolyn at 10:30am as she reads her delightful Railfence Bunch children's books and gives children (and adults) an opportunity to hold four-day-old baby chicks.
 

Sunday May 3, join us for brunch with Janie Chang.

Born in Taiwan, Janie Chang has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, New Zealand and Canada. She writes historical fiction with a personal connection, drawing from family history and ancestral stories. Chang has a degree in computer science and is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University. 

In her new novel, The Library of Legends, a convoy of student refugees travel across China, fleeing the hostilities of a brutal war with Japan.

China, 1937. When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, nineteen-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of students, faculty and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the refugees who are at risk; Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure: a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.

Tickets are $25(+HST) and are available in-store or by calling 905-852-4282

This event will be hosted at Wooden Sticks in Uxbridge and will include a full brunch in the ticket price. 

(Or as part of our Spring 2020 Passport of Literary Events. See full passport roster here)
 

Tuesday May 26, join us for dessert & coffee with bestselling author Jeff Rubin.

Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist and bestselling author. A world-leading expert on trade and energy, and former chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets, he recently served as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance founded by Jim Balsillie. His first book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, was an international bestseller, and was favourably reviewed in both Time and Newsweek. The book was the number-one-selling non-fiction book in Canada and won the National Business Book Award, as well as being longlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Since then, he has written two other bestsellers, The End of Growth and The Carbon Bubble. 

His new book, The Expendables, is a provocative, far-reaching account of how the middle class got stuck with the bill for globalization, and how the blowback--from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe--will change the developed world.

Tickets are $25(+HST) and are available in-store or by calling 905-852-4282

This event will be hosted at Wooden Sticks in Uxbridge and will include dessert & coffee in the ticket price. 

(Or as part of our Spring 2020 Passport of Literary Events. See full passport roster here)