Globe and Mail/Ben McNally Brunch

A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Philanthropy by Lawrence Scanlan

A powerful and personal exploration of generosity by one of Canada’s finest journalists.

Lawrence Scanlan selected twelve different charitable organizations and spent a month in each. What he discovered during his year-long odyssey was the new face of philanthropy—its players, its politics, its undeniable satisfactions, and its fundamental perils.

The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir by Judy Fong Bates

An elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives.

Wild Horse Annie and The Last of the Mustangs: The Life of Velma Johnston by Alison Griffiths

In 1950, Velma Johnston was a secretary at an insurance company in Reno, Nevada. Twenty years later, she had become a national hero, responsible for spurring Congress into passing legislation that protected wild horses, a feat that cemented her renown as "Wild Horse Annie." This stirring biography is the first to tell the story of Johnston's life and her extraordinary dedication to the mustangs that represent the spirit of the West.

Ways of Staying by Kevin Bloom

As a journalist, Kevin Bloom had witnessed and reported on the rising tide of violence in post-Apartheid South Africa. But when his own cousin was killed in a vicious random attack, the questions he’d been asking about the troubling political and social changes in his country took on a sickeningly personal urgency. Still stunned by the loss, Bloom begins to trace the path of violence from the murder of his cousin in the hills of Zululand to the fatal shooting of the historian David Rattray, linking these individual crimes to the riven political landscape, and the riots and xenophobic attacks of 2008.