November 8, 2026, at 1p.m.

Dick the Delightful Duck

Read by Sheila Quinn

Part of the Family Festival Court-Curcuit

November 14, 2026, 1 - 3 p.m.

Author Chantal Patenaude

It Is What It Is

Chantal Patenaude will be at Brome Lake Books on Saturday November 14, 2026, from 1 - 3 p.m. to talk about her new book: It Is What It Is.


After decades of living abroad, Chantal Patenaude returns to Canada and persuades her seventy-nine-year-old mother, Pierrette, to move from California to Ottawa. With her mother nearby, Chantal expects to worry less.

Instead, she witnesses troubling changes in her mother’s language and behavior. What first seem like “senior moments” eventually lead to a devastating diagnosis of aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).


It Is What It Is is an intimate memoir about the realities so many families face when dementia enters their lives: the gradual role reversal between parent and child, the difficult decisions, the heartbreak of progressive loss, and the small moments that suddenly mean everything.

Honest, moving and unexpectedly uplifting, this is a story not only about what dementia takes away, but about what remains: love, dignity, joy and connection.

Le choix de livre de Poppy

Poppy's Pick

août 2026 September

  • END TIMES FASCISM And the Fight for the Living World: End Times Fascism is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unliveable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout—whether by repairing to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts and contradictions and their nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leaves them vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics—rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect.


  • OUR NOBLE SELVES: When foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain in 1949 from Singapore, held for years as a POW, he takes a quiet office job with The Festival of Britain, a nostalgic government-funded endeavor to celebrate British creativity, grit, and ingenuity. There, he joins an oddball team of misfits, ne'er-do-wells, and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch.

    But when one of Flynn’s dates, a surly Frenchwoman, goes missing, everything is upended. The last person to see her prior to her disappearance, Flynn is thrust into the center of the investigation. At first, he finds the suspicions preposterous. But it’s true he has no memory of the hours following the Frenchwoman’s departure, and there’s the fact of the nasty black eye he had upon waking. As evidence mounts, Flynn begins to wonder, could he have killed her? And, importantly, are any of his new friends actually foes?


  • REDWOOD: In 1981, KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, codenamed “Redwood,” was the best Soviet officer in Iran, running spies in the wake of the Islamic revolution and working with a hidden network of Iranian communists to undermine the new regime. But Kuzichkin had a problem, a sexual secret that, if revealed, would humiliate him with his colleagues, cost him his job, and send him into exile. Desperate for a solution, he reached out to the only place he believed could help: Britain’s MI6.

    This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage, and its extraordinary unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It’s about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, and betrayal. Drawing on never-before-seen archival material and revealing interviews with the participants, Redwoodplunges readers back into the world of The Spy and the Traitor, where the fate of millions turns on the split-second decisions of spies under pressure.