National Network for Equitable Library Service

Elena and Mahfouz meet in Montreal in the spring of 2008. That summer, however, Mahfouz doesn't return from a trip to Cairo, and his father is picked up and held indefinitely for unknown charges on undisclosed evidence. No longer in contact with each other, Elena and Mahfouz must separately come to terms with their historical situation, preparing for a future shaped by forces they struggle to understand.

Bellecour is about a man's metaphysical return to a series of enigmatic sexual moments that occurred when he was nine years old in the Paris of 1963. This journey blurs the physical lines between present and past, between Toronto and Paris, and ultimately between sexual awakening and sexual abuse.

Liz is waiting for her big break in Hollywood, when a different offer comes her way. The wealthy Naomi Baum, a best-selling author, asks Liz to impersonate her on the Ted Hillman Show. The reclusive Naomi cannot bear public appearances but is desperate to make contact with another guest on the show: Miro Bogdan, the son she has abandoned as a baby. On the set, Liz gives a convincing performance as Naomi Baum and attracts the passions meant for the author. Miro, now a successful installation artist, harbours a deadly hatred for his mother and is plotting her murder.

A Tristram Shandy–esque novella about failing memory and failed writing, from one of French Canada’s most exciting new voices. A young, floundering author meets Robert ‘Baloney’ Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of several evenings, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec’s Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poised to disappear without a trace. But as the blocked writer discovers, Lacerte might just be full of it.

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest. Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet.

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press. Out of the pages of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and into a blustery Montreal weekend steps a modern-day Nora Flood, plundering vivid memories across three Canadian cities - Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal - to uncover the roots of a sexual obsession that has her trapped in its sterile heart.

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones.

Can a breakup break you apart? In Self-Titled, Geoffrey Brown stares into a mirror and writes what he sees, what he thinks, what he feels. The result? A self-portrait that's at once comic and psychotic, a complex consciousness captured in crystalline prose. Memories, manias, miasmas - Brown morphs the machinery of his mind into an utterly original entity, equal parts diary, criminal confession, sex manual and mash note, as he contemplates a breakup.

The 2012 One Book Toronto title. Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls. Alex was witness to this first episode.