NNELS Upgrade

Fourteen-year-old Al is spending the summer on the shores of Ontario’s James Bay with his eccentric archaeologist father. On their last day there, Al paddles his canoe awawy from the rocky, tree-lined shore and is strangely overtaken by a thickfog that disorients him. As the mist rolls over him, Al is startled to see a ship in the distance that he recognizes as the Discover, whose captain was the ill-fated Henry Hudson. Is it a ghostly apparition?

In the tradition of such great Latin American magic realists as Jorge Amada, Sergio Kokis recreates the magic world of a child in Brazil.The novel is told from the point of view of a Brazilian painter in exile somewhere in the northern climes - man who longs for the warmth and vibrancy of his childhood.But his childhood and adolescence were not easy.

First published in 1932, in Finch’s Fortune, Finch Whiteoak celebrates his twenty-first birthday and comes into his inheritance from Grandmother Adeline. He generously takes his elderly uncles to England and lives for a time with his Aunt Augusta. While in England, Finch falls in and out of love with his cousin Sarah Court. He returns to Jalna, where the fortune left to him remains a bone of contention amongst other members of the Whiteoak family. This is book 9 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by The Master of Jalna.

In a small Ontario town, seven women gather occasionally to watch movies on video. Gilaine E. Mitchell skillfully and sensitively presents the story of each woman in a novel that speaks to several generations of women.

Thomas Wainewright - Regency fop, literary hanger-on, collector of art and artifacts, forger and deported felon - is considered one of the most notorious of English murderers. He is believed to have been one of the first recorded serial killers.James King takes on this spectral character in his first novel, Faking, and examines a number of serious questions. Was Wainewright a faker? It’s historical "fact" that he forged sketches, paintings, letters and banknotes - but, more importantly, did he fake his life?

Jessica Marsh, who is fifteen and "hasn’t lost her baby-fat yet," lives with her mother on the top floor of a hundred-year-old triplex in Parkdale, a multicultural area in Toronto. Being an ear-witness to a murder is frightening, but when Raffi, a gentle black man who is her mother’s boyfriend, is arrested as the killer, Jess is terrified.While struggling to unravel the crimes, Jess is also dealing with other problems. She has been estranged from her lawyer father for several years, and Raffi’s arrest gives her an excuse to reestablish contact. She is harassed at school.

A bartender who discovers magic on a winter night, a pair of losers taking a baking class, and a middle-aged woman who goes on a wild limo ride with the ghost of John Diefenbaker. These are a few of the amazing array of characters who live in, or near, Sharon MacFarlane’s fictional village of Palliser, a community struggling to survive in an age of rural depopulation.

Lucy Brenner has left her husband, her town, and her previous life behind. She lives in Longborough, a town halfway between Kingston and Toronto, where she runs a bed and breakfast and where, one day while working in the library, a phone call sets into action events that change her up-to-now quite predictable existence. Lucy’s cousin, David Trimble, has died and made her his sole beneficiary.

Susan Ouriou's first novel explores a season in the life of three women, two sisters - on an artist, the other a codemaker - and their mother. The women have made their separate ways from Montreal to Mexico, the land of their father and husband gone missing ten years ago. Their reunion is a grudging one and their love often aching, uncertain, and flawed. The women's family resembles that of the damselfish, a family of dear enemies where each member jealously guards its own patch of coral reef yet unites with the others to stave off incursions from the outside.

Star Girl flies again in this sequel to the bestselling, award-winning Sophie Sea to Sea. Starting her new classes at the new French school in British Columbia, Sophie is happy to escape the old Alderson Avenue School where stuck-up Elizabeth Proctor and her friends rule. But trouble develops when the teachers go on strike and Sophie is forced back into Alderson. Will she have to endure as an outcast? Or will she, like Star Girl, save the day with a daring rescue?