Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

SORRY, NOT SORRY de Judy Eaton

A bold and original examination of a universal human phenomenon in the vein of Adam Grant’s Think Again and Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, SORRY, NOT SORRY uses cutting edge psychology, cultural history, and first-hand research to answer the question of why we apologize, and how we can say sorry better.

SORRY, NOT SORRY:
The Power of Apologies in a Divided World
by Dr. Judy Eaton
Bloomsbury US, Summer 2026
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

We all know the power of giving and receiving a humble apology – just as we all know when an “apology” is meaningless. However, as much as we think we might know about apologies, we tend talk about them in broad, shallow terms: What makes a “good” apology? When is an apology necessary, and when is it not? Why do members of some cultures seem to apologize more than others?

SORRY, NOT SORRY takes an original look at the history and science of the humble apology, showcasing the power of apologies throughout time and how the apology has never been more important in today’s world. Exploring the universal nature of apologies, tracing their evolution and history, first as an adaptive mechanism for survival and then continuing as a nonviolent form of conflict resolution, it shows how apologies are universal and that their essential function – to help us connect better with each other – crosses borders, time, and even species.

SORRY, NOT SORRY will expand the way we think about apologies by showing how they serve a deeply important universal function – to interrupt our natural instinct to seek revenge on those who hurt us. It will also demonstrate that the ability to apologize well has been essential to our survival as a species.

Dr. Judy Eaton is Professor of Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. She has spent more than two decades studying apologies and forgiveness – in friendships and romantic partners, the workplace, and the criminal justice system. Her work has been profiled in prominent media outlets such as Esquire, Time, NBC News, CBC News, Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Houston Chronicle. She has been invited to give public talks on topics including whether Canadians apologize too much, death row apologies, and the benefits of forgiveness, among much more. She lives in Ontario with her family, where she apologizes multiple times each day for things that do not require apologies. As a British-born Canadian, this comes naturally to her.

A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK de Laura Brooke Robson

Laura Brooke Robson has crafted a fascinating story about the choices we make, the responsibilities we carry, and the ambiguities of regret.

A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK
by Laura Brooke Robson
Mira/HarperCollins, February 2025
(via Harvey Klinger, Inc.)

On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: when a woman can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld, and turn anyone she sees to stone. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each only lasts three months, the people skelds turn to stone are very much dead.

That’s how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren, though, has always been determined to stay, to live out his life in the only place he’s ever known as home, even if that life could be cut short. They cannot see eye to eye—and yet, they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else? And how do you decide how much you’re willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?

“A lyrical, melancholy, and deeply moving story about the people we love and the places we long for, even when we know we shouldn’t. Aching and poignant.” —Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

Laura Brooke Robson grew up in Oregon and studied English and Creative Writing at Stanford. She is also the author of the young adult novels Girls at the Edge of the World and The Sea Knows My Name. Laura lives in New York.

CONTEMPLATION OF A CRIME de Susan Juby

Buddhist butler and reluctant investigator Helen Thorpe bands together with her fellow butler school graduates to rescue her very wealthy employer and his son.

CONTEMPLATION OF A CRIME
by Susan Juby
HarperCollins Canada, June 2025

Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant.

The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. The motley assortment of participants includes a burned-out environmental activist, an internet troll, a clued-out consumerist, an alleged white nationalist, and a man who was arrested at the Freedom Convoy. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda.

No rapprochement between the warring or at least endlessly bickering parties seem possible. But when something deadly happens, they must learn to work together. First, they must figure out who among them can be trusted.

Susan Juby is the award-winning, bestselling author of many novels, including Mindful of Murder and A Meditation on Murder, the first two books featuring Helen Thorpe.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY de Susan Swan

Where do we belong if we don’t fit in? A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY:
A Memoir About Taking Up Space
by Susan Swan
foreword by Margaret Atwood
HarperCollins Canada, April 2025

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.

Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex living entity that is the world. » —Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk

Susan Swan is a novelist and non-fiction writer and a professor emerita at York University. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.

PARENTS WEEKEND d’Alex Finlay

From the bestselling author of If Something Happens to Me, comes one of the year’s most anticipated thrillers.

PARENTS WEEKEND
by Alex Finlay
Minotaur Books, May 2025
(via The Aaron Priest Literary Agency)

In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids―five residents of Campisi Hall―never show up at dinner.

At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon, the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.

Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella―The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them―come from five very different families. What led them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril or a threat to the friend group from within?

Told through multiple points of view in past and present―and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift―PARENTS WEEKEND explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family.

Alex Finlay is the bestselling author of the 2021 breakout novel, Every Last Fear, the 2022 Goodreads Choice nominee for Best Mystery and Thriller, The Night Shift, the 2023 Library Reads Hall of Fame recipient, What Have We Done, and his latest release, the USA Today bestseller, If Something Happens to Me. Alex’s novels are regularly on “best of the year” lists, have been translated into twenty-five languages, and have been optioned for film or television. Every Last Fear is in development for a major limited series. Alex lives in Washington, DC and Virginia.