MANDA PRESENTS

A digital short series featuring our authors from across Canada and around the world.

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Hey Canadian Indie Booksellers! Today we’re launching MANDA PRESENTS – a digital short series featuring our authors from across Canada and around the world! We’re kicking it off with David Sax, the author of The Soul of the Entrepreneur, who talks about why #indiebookstores are the real unsung heroes.

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In the second installment of MANDA PRESENTS, Waubgeshig Rice the bestselling author of Moon of the Crusted Snow (published by ECW Press , reflects on our current time and how his dystopian novel looks at different ways we can work together to create a better community going forward. As Waub says, “It isn’t the end of the world, it’s a chance really to start over.”

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Tom Ryan, the author of Keep This to Yourself, I Hope You’re Listening and When You Get the Chance, talks about working through plot points from his beautiful Cape Breton Island farm, and winning the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Young Adult Crime Novel for Keep This to Yourself. “After 10 years of writing and publishing, this is my first award, and it is really gratifying to see a book that I put so much into get such great feedback from readers of all ages…” (Tom also recently won the 2020 ITW Thriller Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Keep This to Yourself!) Tap the image below to watch the full video.

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Congratulations to author @shani_mootoo and publisher @bookhug_press! Shani’s brilliant novel Polar Vortex is a finalist for this year's @gillerprize.

For our latest MANDA PRESENTS video, we asked Shani to reflect on what it means to be nominated for the fourth time. Here, Shani recalls attending the 1997 gala, the year she was shortlisted alongside Carol Shields and Mordecai Richler. She recounts telling Mordecai after the ceremony “that he might have won the money, but I also won something being on a list with him and Carol.’ She later remarks, “I'm very pleased with [Polar Vortex]. When I was finished, I knew that I had gone back to that first original way of working…to let the story find itself…and then to have been patted on the back for it with this nomination has meant a great deal to me. In kind of a sense, I’ve won something again already.”

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Author Marlowe Granado’s spellbinding debut HAPPY HOUR published by @flyingbooks is the perfect antidote for these complicated and lonely days. Her novel follows two young women, Isa Epley and her best fiend Gala Novak, as they sell clothes and traverse through a scorching New York City in the summer of 2013. As Marlowe says, “I hope that people are finding it a light during this time – this very confusing and difficult year that we are in.” She continues, “I would hope that it is also something that people want to revisit time and time again because it makes them feel good, and they enjoy being in Isa’s world, and reading her diary, and feeling in on a joke with them.”