Dear Readers, whenever we’re in Toronto we make a point of visiting our favourite Canadian independent bookstore, Ben McNally. In the twenty-five years that I’ve been visiting the country, it’s been located at three different addresses, and is currently at 108 Queen Street East.

It isn’t the largest bookshop in Toronto (that would have to be one of the many Indigo branches) but it gives meaning to that over-worked word, curated. I never go into this shop without buying something – biography, nature-writing, history, politics, are all well-represented, and I find the selection irresistible. Just as well as our Latitude flexible economy flight with Air Canada lets us take an extra hold bag for free.

This time I’m particularly looking forward to nature-writer Jennifer Ackerman’s ‘What an Owl Knows’ (not surprisingly, about owls) and Orlando Reade’s “What in me is Dark”, about the long afterlife of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Incidentally, I met Reade’s mother-in-law in Waterstones in Islington, such is the nature of bookshops. And I also have ‘Three Wild Dogs’ by Markus Zusak, who you might remember as the author of ‘The Book Thief’, a huge hit a few years ago. This book is a kind of ‘memoir in dogs’, so it will be interesting to see how that works.

What I’m currently reading though, before I get onto my new pile, is Sarah Moss’s ‘My Good Bright Wolf’, another memoir but this one about the author’s eating disorder. She explores not only the origins of her own anorexia, but also the depiction of food and young women in the books that she read as a child, from ‘Little Women’ to ‘Little House on the Prairie’. It’s an absorbing read, about how children are shaped, and about whose truth gets to prevail. Highly recommended.

So, what are you reading at the moment – any recommendations to add to my tottering pile?