From the author of the international bestselling All My Friends Are Superheroes!
BORN WEIRD
by Andrew Kaufman
The Friday Project/HarperCollins, December 2012
(via The Rights Factory)
The Weirds have always been a little peculiar, but not one of them ever suspected that they’d been cursed.
At the moment of the births of her five grandchildren Annie Weir gave each one a special power she thought was a blessing. Richard, the oldest, would always keep safe; Abba would always have hope; Lucy would never get lost and Kent would be able to beat anyone in a fight. As for Angie, she would always forgive, instantly. But over the years these blessings turned out to be curses that ruined their lives.
Now Annie is dying and she has one last task for Angie: gather her far-flung brothers and sisters and assemble them in her grandmother’s hospital room so that at the moment of her death, she can lift these blessings-turned-curses. And Angie has just two weeks to do it.
What follows is a quest like no other, tearing up highways and racing through airports, from a sketchy Winnipeg nursing home to the small island kingdom Upliffta, from the family’s crumbling ancestral mansion in Toronto to a motel called Love. Along the way, Angie searches for the answer to the greatest family mystery of all: what really happened to their father, whose maroon Maserati was fished out of a lake so many years ago?
Andrew Kaufman is the author of All My Friends Are Superheroes, The Tiny Wife, The Waterproof Bible, and Born Weird. He was born in Wingham, Ontario, the birthplace of Alice Munro, making him the second-best writer from a town of 3000. His work has been published in eleven countries and translated into nine languages. He is also an accomplished screenwriter and lives in Toronto with his wife and their two children.
Madeline Miller’s Circe meets Rushdie’s Midnight Children with a dash of the whimsy and caper of Wes Anderson, THE MEMOIRS of VALMIKI RAO is about young love and the loss of innocence set against the backdrop of one of the most tumultuous periods of modern Indian history. In a nondescript apartment in a corner of Mumbai, a retired postman, Valmiki Rao, reflects on a month in 1992. A month in which a mosque burned and religious extremism reigned. A month in which young men took up arms against their brothers and made enemies of neighbours. A month which would have long-lasting effects on modern India. It was a time when blood flowed on the streets and men and women gave up their lives for invisible gods.
Jaffa is Sabiha and Ahmed’s home. It is where they’re raising their sons, and where they have opened their own cinema, so that they can sit in the back row and cry at Shirley Temple movies. But when Israel declares independence in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war breaks out, the family is forced to flee. They embark on an Odyssey that takes them first to Lebanon and then to Turkey. As they search for a new home, all they find is derelict temporary housing and states that refuse to accept them. They grieve for the dead, but never lose their lust for life – not to mention their sense of humour. 
Muna is about to graduate from high school when she meets Magnus, a French teacher and photographer. She spends the night with him. When the Berlin Wall comes down, he disappears. Seven years later, they meet again – and become a couple. Muna thinks she has found the love of her life. But as soon as they take their first trip together, cracks start showing in their relationship. Over the years the coldness, unpredictability and violence get worse. But Muna isn’t willing to give up. 
Big changes happen when no one’s looking: this is Keller’s fearless and irresistibly original story about breaking boundaries and an imaginative revolution – a fierce yet tender novel about two women determined to start something new. But how?