National Network for Equitable Library Service

An oil spill on the West Coast coincides with a loved one's death. An enigmatic young musician experiences the rise and fall of his career, as told through videos posted to YouTube. Sometimes romantic, sometimes elegiac, Alex Leslie's coastal stories take place in ocean inlets and city streets. Haunted as much by technology as by their own ghosts, Leslie's characters face the disappearance of sanity, love, and landscape. An electric, poetic debut.

One Friday, Vancouver lawyer Paul Brenner has dinner with his son, Daniel. They talk about work, health, money, and music, and part ways. The following evening, Paul receives the phone call that is every parent's worst nightmare: Daniel has been killed in Stanley Park. Hold Me Now is an unflinching portrayal of a father's grief, as Paul learns how very different the new world—a world without his son—will be for him. The investigation of Daniel’s murder, the trial, and the sentencing of the killer test Paul’s faith in the legal system.

A prostitute takes shelter with a group of young anarchists. A sister goes missing, mailing a trail of encoded postcards from destinations across the globe. The daughters of a Montreal bagel-shop owner navigate the tricky terrain of being young, Sikh, and female, one growing larger while the other fades. A woman watches with lust and longing as the object of her affections, her pregnant roommate, is pursued by an unsavory suitor. And a precocious child spies on her adoptive mother, trying to grasp the secret of her mother’s hidden obsession and of her own unexplained origins.

Rhonda Douglas’s debut collection dazzles with its daring and dangerous prose. Welcome to the Circus, where every moment is a tight-rope act, precariously balancing on the edge of destruction. In these stories, a choir processes its collective grief at the loss of one of its members to cancer; a teenage boy marks himself with the poetry of John Donne; God explains the collapse of the cod fishery; Mata Hari stands trial; and two sisters try to reconcile their respective places in the family porn emporium business before everything blows up.

Four distinct voices weave together the tale of a dysfunctional Montreal family obsessed with climbing the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. This literary debut by Jewish Daily Forward editor Sigal Samuel is reminiscent of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season. The Meyer family lives in Mile End, home to a mashup of hipsters and Hasidic Jews, where down the street crazy Mr. Katz is building a tree out of plucked leaves, toilet paper rolls, and dental floss.

Charlie Hill has a promising job, a wonderful best friend, a perfect husband, and an anxiety disorder that she is desperately trying to hide from the rest of the world. But the harsh reality of her mental illness comes to light when an unexpected event forces Charlie to make the most important decision of her life, risking everything in the process. Trapped is the story of a woman on the brink of a life-altering event, struggling to manage her anxiety in a situation that is becoming increasingly impossible to control.

In the fertile artistic milieu of 1927 Toronto ... After winning the commission to paint a war memorial mural for Christ Church Grange Park, Nora Britton is found dead on the church floor. An accidental fall from the scaffold she was working on? So it seems, until police detective Paul Shenstone discovers that she has been the subject of parishioners’ death threats. Shenstone’s sleuthing takes him from slum to mansion, from speakeasy to laboratory to artist’s studio. The dead Nora becomes his obsession.

Richard Gould was looking forward to his retirement, to spending at least part of his time in the heritage home he had renovated in a quiet village in Ontario, and particularly to his major project—bringing a ruin back to its former glory as a flour mill. The discovery of two old books hidden in the ruin promised to add extra spice to this project, until he was drawn into events that were at first odd, then ominous, and all too soon lethal. Inexorably, Gould was carried deeper into a dangerous web and finally to a murderous encounter near the historic German city of Heidelberg.

The Walking Man begins in the deserts of Jordan and explores a year in the life of the main character - someone very similar to the author - and his attempts to make sense of a tumultuous year. Based on many of the author's experiences, The Walking Man mixes reality and fiction in a tale of heartbreak, friendship, and personal history that uses walking to thread it all together.

When tragedy strikes, thirteen-year-old Maddy Barnes's life shatters. Torn from her family and village, she finds herself out on the mean streets of Toronto in the 1970s, a gritty twilight world of street kids, speed freaks, glam rockers, body rub parlours and a vicious biker named Hermann. But Toronto is also the centre of Canada's emerging gay revolution. As men and women start coming out of the shadows, Maddy confronts the shadows of her own past, and ultimately comes to understand that sometimes there's no explaining the unspeakable things we do for love.