The opening act for our Spring 2020 Passport Series is seen daily by thousands of viewers on CTV's daytime panel show, The Social.

Cynthia Loyst will join us for brunch and a chat with interviewer Wendy O'Brien at Wooden Sticks Golf Club at 11:00 am.

From The Social cohost Cynthia Loyst, a deeply personal lifestyle book about how to take the guilt out of pleasure and get to the heart of what you need and want in all aspects of life—from family, home, and work to love and sex.

Find Your Pleasure is a pleasure revolution: where society has told women to feel guilty or ashamed for embracing pleasures, Cynthia Loyst shows you how to get to the heart of what you need and want, in every aspect of life.

Live: Uncover the beauty of everyday moments, celebrate family and friends, find fun and satisfaction in your workdays, and enjoy the immense rewards parenting has to offer—all while being mindful of taking care of yourself.
Love: Cynthia reveals everything from learning to enjoy your body more, ways to feel intimate and communicate effectively with your partner, and the keys to having better sex.
Inspire: Find out how to let your creative self bloom, seek out exciting new pathways in life, and let kindness guide you with Cynthia’s tips and tricks for mastering mindfulness and meditation.

Through her insightful anecdotes, Cynthia empowers women to revel in all of life’s joys, even the messy ones. Filled with beautiful color photographs, Find Your Pleasure is a treat for the soul that you can devour in one go or savor in tiny bites.

Tickets are $25 + HST and are available by calling 905-852-4282.

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

 

Sunday March 22, join us for brunch with bestselling authors Kathy Reichs and Peter Robinson.

Kathy Reichs's first novel Déjà Dead was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Kathy was also a producer of the hit Fox TV series, Bones, which is based on her work and her novels. 

Her new novel, A Conspiracy of Bones, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan returns and must use all her tradecraft to discover the identity of a faceless corpse, its connection to a decade-old missing child case, and why the dead man had her cellphone number. 

Peter Robinson's critically acclaimed crime novels have won numerous awards in Britain, the United States, Canada, and Europe, and are published in translation all over the world. Several Inspector Banks novels have been adapted for television by ITV and have appeared on PBS.

Many Rivers to Cross is the 26th book in the DCI Banks series. A skinny young boy is found dead--his body carelessly stuffed into a wheelie bin. Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team are called to investigate. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Was his body discarded, or left as a warning to someone? He looks Middle Eastern, but no one on the Eastvale Estate has seen him before...

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 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)
 

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)