National Network for Equitable Library Service

After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and even decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice.

A heartfelt and quirky look at growing up mixed-race in 1990s Calgary, viewed through the lens of the irrepressible Grace. The strange interests of Grace and her mother Belinda, ufology and undersea life respectively, do not overshadow the human kindness and love that suffuses this novel.

When his parents' car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains detached, striking up a relationship with a woman in a neighbouring house... and stumbling across evidence that his mother may have engaged in a longstanding extramarital affair herself.

One Friday, Vancouver lawyer Paul Brenner has dinner with his son, Daniel. They talk about work, health, money, and music, and part ways. The following evening, Paul receives the phone call that is every parent's worst nightmare: Daniel has been killed in Stanley Park. 'Hold Me Now' is an unflinching portrayal of a father's grief, as Paul learns how very different the new world -- a world without his son -- will be for him. The investigation of Daniel's murder, the trial, and the sentencing of the killer test Paul's faith in the legal system.

Delia Buckley hasn't seen Daniel Wolfe in twenty-two years, ever since he'd abandoned her and their unborn child. But now here he is, knowing all about Delia's family troubles and wanting to employ her to nurse him in his terminal illness. Desperate for money to keep both the family farm, and her sister Maggie in the nursing home she's lived in for years, Delia is in no position to turn down Daniel's very handsome offer. She will keep a professional distance. But the past rises up from all sides. Daniel wants to be forgiven.

Eleanor Sawchuck wants to spend her last years in peace, enjoying life while she still can, perhaps even pursuing a December romance. So when her book club decides to tackle a memoir by a young woman who suffered horrible abuse as a child, Eleanor balks. Ultimately, however, everyone in the Last Chance Ladies' Book Club ends up reading it. Then the unthinkable happens. The alleged abuser, who is now an old man, moves into their complex. Eleanor’s world is transformed into one of suspicion, doubt, disgust, and guilt over her helplessness.

The stories in Permanent Tourists feature displaced characters loosely connected through a support group, all of them dealing with loss precipitated by an elusive father, husband or lover, by a wife's death, a lost child, sibling rivalries. Tourists in their own lives, these characters are often paralysed by emotional inertia and are fleeing to evade their responsibilities, their failed relationships, their own shortcomings. Within the unfamiliar, their problems resurface and they're forced to confront and re-examine them.

After experiencing the disintegration of their parents' marriage, Claudine and Janine Beaulieu's lives are further complicated when their mother Odette remarries an Anglophone and they are forced to "turn English." Now, years later, Claudine has made a career out of documentary filmmaking, focusing on the painful lives of other women; Janine, a wife and mother, questions her feelings for her sister's boyfriend; and Odette succumbs to her Valium and rum addiction in a luxury retirement villa in Jamaica.

Kavita Gupta is a woman in transition. When her troubled older brother, Sunil, disappears, she does everything in her power to find him, convinced that she can save him. Ten days later, the police arrive at her door to inform her that Sunil's body has been found. Her world is devastated. She finds herself in crisis mode, trying to keep the pieces of her life from falling apart even more. As she tries to cope with her loss, the support system around her begins to unravel.

What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn’t do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he’s overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we’re all doing here. So he’s made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what’s been thought and said.