Audiobooks narrated by Ryanne Chisholm

"Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor’s family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Depression. Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy’s expensive cast off clothes, and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. When Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person. At home, Lexi finds a journal written by her older brother during the family’s journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one hat reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Waterloo, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realization that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny. Watermelon Syrup is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities."

Annie Jacobsen, Di Brandt, Jane Finlay-Young (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

Street Angel

"Magie Dominic's first memoir, The Queen of Peace Room, was shortlisted for the Canadian Women's Studies Award, ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award, and the Judy Grahn Award. Told over an eight-day period, the book captured a lifetime of turbulent memories, documenting with skill Dominic's experiences of violence, incest, and rape. But her story wasn't finished. Street Angel opens to the voice of an eleven-year-old Dominic. She's growing up in Newfoundland. Her mother suffers from terrifying nighttime hallucinations. Her father's business is about to collapse. She layers the world she hears on radio and television onto her family, speaking in paratactic prose with a point-blank delivery. She finds relief only in the glamour of Hollywood films and the majesty of Newfoundland's wilderness. Revealing her life through flashbacks, humour, and her signature self-confidence, Dominic takes readers from 1950s Newfoundland to 1960s Pittsburgh, 1970s New York, and the end of the millennium in Toronto. Capturing the long days of childhood, this book questions how important those days are in shaping who we become as we age and time seems to speed up. With quick brush-stroke chapters Dominic chronicles sixty years of a complex, secretive family in this story about violence, adolescence, families, and forgiveness."

Magie Dominic (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Queen of Peace Room

"What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime? Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer - and frees herself from the memories of her violent past. On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature's images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes. In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century."

Magie Dominic (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance

"Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence. Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action. With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance."

Allison Hargreaves (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure

"In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa (before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey); her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journey, as well as her nÃ¤ivetÃ© about the complex social and political issues in Africa. Once in the field, she recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa. Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author's response to an "exotic" world far removed from the Toronto where she grew up, the book records her visits to Zanzibar and Victoria Falls and her climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century. The book's foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg's narrative."

Anne Innis Dagg (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

What the Oceans Remember

"Sonja Boon's heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than 30 years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity, as she sought to answer two questions that have dogged her over the years: Where does she belong? And who does she belong to? Boon's archival research-in Suriname, the Netherlands, the UK, and Canada-brings her opportunities to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the archives themselves, the tangliness of oceanic migration, histories, the meaning of legacy, music, love, freedom, memory, ruin, and imagination. Ultimately, she reflected on the relevance of our past to understanding our present. Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory. More importantly, it addresses the relevance of our past to understanding our present. It shows the multiplicity of identities and origins that can shape the way we understand our histories and our own selves."

Sonja Boon (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Circle on the Surface

"It's 1943. Enman and Una Greene are newly married. Each is haunted by their respective pasts, and each harbours secrets. They have hopes of a happy life together-though they have little idea how to create such a life. Enman brings Una to his childhood home in rural Barrein, Nova Scotia, where he hopes they will stay. Una is restless and feeling increasingly trapped, and longs for the city life she once had. Una meets a mysterious man, and then a body washes up on a beach. There are rumours of German sailors roaming the dunes. When the Greenes receive the news they have been waiting for, and that Una is convinced will save her and her marriage, she she begins to unravel in ways neither is prepared for. From critically acclaimed and bestselling author Carol Bruneau comes an achingly honest portrait of a marriage in a time of war-and an examination of how it is that we come to know ourselves."

Carol Bruneau (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

Catching the Light

"Dancing between points of view, Catching the Light explores the ordinary lives of two extraordinary people: Cathy Russell is functionally illiterate, but a talented painter; Hutch Parsons is a high-energy busybody. From small-town Newfoundland to bustling Halifax, these two must learn to rely on one another in new and unexpected ways."

Susan Sinnott (Author), Ryanne Chisholm (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Ryanne Chisholm

Join Our Community