When:

Sunday September 18, 10.00 am 

Where:

King Edward Hotel, 37 King St E.

Brunch is served in the Vanity Fair Ballroom on the second floor of the King Edward Hotel.

Tickets are $55.00 each (taxes included) and must be purchased in advance.

Tickets are non-refundable.

Please call us at 416.361.0032 with your credit card information to reserve tickets

The Books and the Authors

John Aubrey, My Own Life by Ruth Scurr

New York Review Books

John Aubrey, My Own Life is an extraordinary book about the first modern biographer that reimagines what biography can be. This intimate diary of Aubrey’s days is composed of his own words, collected, collated, and enlarged upon by Ruth Scurr in an act of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination. Aubrey was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1626, and is best known as the author of Brief Lives, a book that redefined the art of biography through its informal and memorable sketches of the lives of his contemporaries, both men and women. The reign of Queen Elizabeth and the dissolution of the monasteries were not too far distant in memory during Aubrey’s boyhood. Helived through some of England’s most interesting times: the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the brief rule of Oliver Cromwell and his son, and the restoration of Charles II.

Barbarian Lost by Alexandre Trudeau

HarperCollins Canada

To this day, China remains an enigma. Ancient, complex and fast moving, it defies easy understanding.

Ever since he was a boy, Alexandre Trudeau has been fascinated by this great county. Recounting his experiences in the China of recent years, Trudeau visits artists and migrant workers, townspeople and rural farmers. Often accompanied by a young Chinese journalist, Vivien, he explores realities caught in time between the China of our memories and the thrust of progress. The China he seeks out lurks in hints and shadows. It flickers dimly amidst all the glare and noise. The people he encounters along the way give up but small secrets yet each revelation comes as a surprise that jolts us from our preconceived ideas and forces us to challenge our most secure notions.

Barbarian Lost, Trudeau’s first book, is an insightful and witty account of the dynamic changes going on right now in China, as well as a look back into the deeper history of this highly codified society. On the ground with the women and men who make China tick, Trudeau shines new light on the country as only a traveller with his storytelling abilities could.

The Banker and the Blackfoot by Edward Chamberlin

Knopf Canada

In his remarkable and entertaining memoir of his beloved grandfather, Ted Chamberlin conjures up vividly the never-before-told story of a particular time and place not long after Canada was founded. 
This is the story of when “Sorreltop Jack” was friends with Crop Eared Wolf; of two decades, 1885 to 1905, when the people in the foothills of modern-day Alberta—First Nation and Métis, rancher and settler—respectfully set out to accommodate Blackfoot sovereignty and new settlement, before Canada broke its Treaty promises to the first peoples.

It was a colourful, unpredictable time. Fort Macleod was a small ramshackle town nestled in the heart of Blackfoot territory when young Jack Cowdry arrived and met Crop Eared Wolf—the legendary Káínai (Blood) warrior, brilliant horseman and sophisticated strategist, who would soon succeed his father, the great statesman Red Crow, as head chief of the Bloods. Friendship and trust became a bond. Here Jack opened his first bank and fell in love with the author’s grandmother, Gussie Thompson, who travelled across the country to work as a teacher, her heart open to whatever adventures life could offer her. The new town embraced it all—Sun Dances and social dances, bibles and medicine bundles, horse races and polo matches, and a wild variety of great characters.

Resonant with the power of storytelling, this compelling memoir illuminates the challenges we face now, and the opportunity we still have to uphold the promise made when Canada was founded.

Unearthed by Alexandra Risen

Viking Penguin

Alexandra Risen’s father dies just as she and her husband purchase a nondescript house set atop a natural gorge in the middle of the city. The garden is choked with weeds and crumbling structures. Over the years, as she undertakes the replanting, it stirs memories of her childhood when a nearby forest was her only escape from an empty home life. 
 As Risen beats back the bushes to unveil the garden’s mysteries, her mother has a stroke and develops dementia. On one of her last visits home, she discovers an envelope of yellowed documents that helps her piece together some of her parents’ unknown story.