National Network for Equitable Library Service

A year after watching Leo go through thin ice, twelve-year- old Ferd is obsessed with the idea that he can persuade his dead brother to come home through a campaign of letters. Plaintive notes appear around the house-folded squares of paper in the rain reservoir, kitchen sink, and washing machine. Ferd's mother, Algoma, is also unravelling; attempting to hide her son's letters, reconnect with her increasingly distant husband, and rebuild her life.

It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. "You should've been born a boy," Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world.

The Discovery of Flight is a novel in two voices about the relationship between two sisters, the older of whom is disabled by cerebral palsy and only able to communicate with assistive technology (she can control her computer by moving her eyes). It interweaves the fantasy novel sixteen-year-old Libby is writing for Sophie's thirteenth birthday, and Sophie's diary, in which she discusses the deteriorating condition of her older sister.

The Girl Who Was Born That Way is the story of the Berk family, not exactly an ordinary Jewish family, trying to bury its Holocaust past while starting over in post-war USA. The novel centers on the dynamics between the family's four daughters, the two oldest girls who grew up in the Lodz Ghetto and he two youngest who came of age in an idyllic American suburb. The story is told from the perspective of the youngest child in the family, whose sisterly love and compassion drive the novel's action. Can her curiosity bring the family's dark Holocaust history into the open?

The Narrows of Fear (Wapawikoscikanik) weaves the stories of a group of women committed to helping one another. Despite abuse experienced by some, both in their own community and in residential schools, these women learn to celebrate their culture, its stories, its dancing, its drums, and its elders. Principal of these elders is Nina, the advisor at the women's shelter. With the help of Sandy and Charlene, Nina uses Indigenous practices to heal the traumatized Mary Ann.

In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She's come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefèvre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He's a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she's the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist.

Imogene Tubbs has never met her father, and raised by her grandmother, she only sees her mother sporadically. But as she grows older, she learns that many people in her small, rural town believe her father is Cecil Jesso, the local drug dealer--a man both feared and ridiculed. Weaving through a maze of gossip, community, and the complications of family, Some People's Children is a revealing and liberating novel about the way others look at us and the power of self-discovery.

Jess is a sensitive creature of habit. Cait is her passionate and impulsive best friend. And in Melt, Heidi Wicks follows the lives of these characters from their teenage years into their late thirties—through drifting desires, fake tans, economic turbulence, kids, grief, job loss, love loss, and personal renewal. Shifting radiantly between the late nineties and the present day, Melt explores the life-sustaining anatomy of friendship and the complex relationships we have with our pasts.

In The End of Music, Jamie Fitzpatrick's two mesmerizing, interwoven narratives circle the lives of Joyce, a modern young woman navigating the fraught social mores of a small town in its post-war heyday, and her son, Carter, more than fifty years later, whose days as an aspiring rock star are over. As Joyce's memories of the past begin to escape her, her son's past returns to haunt him. Brilliantly and unflinchingly revealing the inner lives of his characters, Fitzpatrick offers an extraordinary novel, with two startling twists, about women, men, and reckoning with the past.

Ingrid and Norah have an unconventional upbringing -- growing up in a motel, raised by their mother and her partner. The girls' grandmother, Ada, who owns the Blue Moth, has always kept them at a distance. But when she buys a piano for the motel, that all changes. Years later in England, training to be a soloist, Ingrid loses her voice and must decide what to do. She hears from Norah, who's reviving a party that began during their childhood to celebrate the arrival of mysterious and elusive blue moths.