National Network for Equitable Library Service

Renowned classics professor Roberta Greaves finds her perfect life shattered by her husband's suicide and the huge gambling debts he has left behind. Grief-stricken and angry, Roberta must find a way to pay those debts. Remembering a story by Ovid about intergenerational sex, she decides to write an erotic novel, using a penname because she is worried that her career will suffer if her real identity is discovered. Drama critic John Schubert suspects the truth.

There are many forms of isolation, and Ellie is becoming an expert on them: unloved and ignored as a child in Vienna, up against cultural barriers in Canada, holed up in a cabin in the north. What are the effects of isolation on the brain? Is it loneliness and boredom that makes Ellie take risks and say yes to Vera, her glamorous but deeply disturbed friend? Vera has been abused as a child and is now putting her trust in a charlatan healer. Together they entangle Ellie in a murderous game of fantasy and revenge.

Over the years Trish and Ray have forged a stable family life, despite a rocky beginning almost twenty years earlier — living with their friends on a communal farm that ended badly. Now they are all coming to terms with life in their forties, but Trish has turned angry and insecure. She suddenly finds herself faced with an ailing marriage, a teenaged daughter who would prefer to live with her alcoholic grandmother than at home, and an annoying half sister, Olive, who Trish has been taught to believe is no blood relation.

Robin MacFarland is a somewhat eccentric and highly intelligent journalist for the Home and Garden section of a Toronto paper, who at age fifty-five looks aghast in the mirror and pronounces herself, “Old. Fat. Alcoholic. Alone. Failure.” She resolves to lose weight, quit drinking, and try online dating, although not, perhaps in quite that order. The intrigue begins when Robin chooses to cover a water cooling system conference where she thinks there will be a lot of men. By coincidence, her first online date is with the owner of the water company who is found dead after they have coffee.

The Dead Man is a compelling novel about a woman who is obsessed. Eve, a composer of sacred music and a music therapist, is well aware of the saying, “Physician, heal thyself,” but she just can’t seem to do this. For some unknown reason, she — a sensible, intelligent professional — can’t recover from a brief relationship she had five years ago with a world-famous music critic named Jake. This obsession with Jake is a mystery to Eve’s friends, and also to her.

One Day It Happens is an eclectic collection of short stories by Mary Lou Dickinson, which deal in myriad forms with communication or lack thereof in the lives of the characters. One of the universal factors in human existence is the need to connect with one another. When these characters fail to do so, it is the result of fear, of loneliness, of violence, of impending death. Sometimes they succeed in spite of everything to reach a place of insight and understanding, usually in unexpected ways and to their own surprise.

Why do we keep secrets and why do we confess them? The nine tales in this collection, all told in the first person, are each spun around a well-kept secret, willingly or inadvertently confessed. Sometimes the secrets are at the core of the narrator’s life, other times they appear tangential. Regardless of the magnitude of its burden, the confession finds its way to the reader, through a story told perhaps over a cup of tea, in the pages of a journal or within the intimacy of the narrator’s mind.

Only by Blood is a novel of search for roots, mother-daughter love and family reconciliation. A Polish woman receives puzzling news from her mother just before she dies. She wants to fulfill her mother's last wishes, but has little idea of where to start. Never does she suspect that her search will take her across Poland, back in time and over the ocean. Spanning over sixty years, this story tells about the lengths to which mothers will go in order to save their daughters and the secrets they will keep to protect them from pain.

One Man Dancing is based on the true story of a young Ugandan actor-dancer growing into artistic maturity during the murderous regime of dictator Idi Amin. It follows Charles from his youth in Uganda’s colonial villages, and through his work with artistic guru Robert Serumaga, which takes him on an eye-opening whirlwind international tour. Bounced from Africa to Europe to Canada and back again, Charles experiences bizarre and dangerous encounters with assassination, natural disaster, Idi Amin, and even the CIA.

Rutledge, an aging, divorced man, has treated himself to a Cruise on the Mariola. The Cruise is not just any cruise. It’s the whole shebang. It's around the world. It’s a lifestyle change: G & Ts and tuxedos and cigars and cognac galore. The service is top-rate. And Rutledge’s steward, Raoul, is a good kid. But then a day trip to a Caribbean port ends in commotion. Some people don’t make it back onto the ship. Rutledge, nonplussed, makes use of the vacant machines in the Fitness Room and the unoccupied loungers on deck.