National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 1941, twelve-year-old Rivke Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she witnesses German soldiers slashing her grandfather's beard from his face. Her anger compels her to secretly write her stories and her memories in the margins of a book of fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen. When Dr.

From Black Hand criminals to stand-up cops, from innocent victims and ordinary people to schemers and dreamers: a novel that chronicles one hundred years in the lives and relationships of those who have lived in New York City's Little Italy. A multi-generational, multi-dimensional tale that digs deep into the minds and hearts of this vibrant neighborhood.

Fleeing Stalin's advance into Lithuania, shaken by communism and war, four refugees end up in Toronto in 1949. Vytas, a young doctor who gets into medical school by saving a child's life, is haunted by a lost love. Maryte, a seamstress whose affair with a German officer saved her half-witted brother, struggles to take care of him. Justine, a concert pianist raped during the war, strives to regain her ability to make music. Father Geras, an illegitimate child steered into the priesthood by family, finds purpose in guiding his exiled people.

McKinley's Ghost & the Little Tin Truck tells the story of the Millers, a fictional family struggling among the real events of the early 20th century: the end of the Progressive Era, The Great War and influenza pandemic, prohibition, voting rights for women, the conservative take-over, the Red Scare, xenophobic hatred of immigrants and other “inferiors,” lynching and race riots, union-busting, the elevation of “business” in government and the resulting unparalleled corruption, a wild stock market, spiraling income disparity, the Great Depression, national despair and the seeds of t

The Voyageur is a graphic novel, illustrated by Nick Marinkovich (KENK, Marvel's When The Hulk Attacks, Underworld, Nightwolf, Impaler), written and conceived by documentary filmmaker/screenwriter Jeff Sturge (Mayday, Storming Juno, Cold Blood). Compelling characters drive a fast-paced story set in the 17th century that addresses themes of alienation, a young boy's coming of age and a fish out of water thrust into a strange new world. Marinkovich's signature ink-rendered, photo-based artwork has been heavily stylized to achieve a haunting look.

We follow Loddy and the troupe from The Garage Theatre as their lives unfold against the backdrop of political events in Montreal starting with EXPO 67 and ending in 1970 with the October Crisis. With the city as background, Loddy-Dah explores issues of self-identity and self-acceptance, the magic of friendship and love, and the power of resilience in the face of adversity.

Drawing on history and family legend, Anthony Di Renzo presents a tale of progress and reaction, irony and paradox, in which the splendors of Caserta must yield to the wonders of the Crystal Palace. Both intimate and sweeping, Trinàcria questions the price of pride and the cost of prosperity and contrasts illusions of grandeur and dreams of happiness with the pitiless truth that kills all hope and desire. As readers will learn, this is the fatal spell of Sicily--an island of loss and change--where death alone is eternal.

A Latino bar in Toronto, 1978. The men can't take their eyes off Lisa, but there is something about her that scares them off. She is a little too intense, a little too needy. Don, a realtor with a murky South American past, is unfazed. He listens patiently when Lisa tells him she is looking for her father, a wealthy man living in Argentina. Or so she says. Determined to find her roots, Lisa goes to Argentina. It's a journey born of longing for love and the desperate need for something solid to hold on to. Don offers to come along.

Louise Aubert leaves Mathieu Lord when he joins the Stalinist party. Fifteen years later, she writes a letter in which she dares express her vision of their common history, marked by authoritarianism, mental cruelty and the absence of sharing in the name of love. In the story that follows this letter, Louise recalls each sequence of her break with Mathieu and exposes the duplicity of the intellectual avant-garde. She also describes how she re-entered society freed from censorship and how she finds the inner strength to speak the truth.

Italians as indentured labourers in Southern cotton plantations at the turn of the twentieth century? Entire families scrabbling to survive, dying of malaria, building relationships with their neighbours, many the first generation of freed slaves? Sweet Hope unleashes the little known story of Italians who came looking for a better life in La Terra Nuova and found hardship, misery and their own form of slavery instead.