National Network for Equitable Library Service

Blasted is a story of Ruby Jones, an irreverent, exuberant, and troubled woman who lurches between love affairs and cities. The narrative shifts between generations and geographies, between contemporary life and stories as old as the hill that looms over Ruby's birthplace. All the while, she is haunted by mysteries that surround her father and the generations before him. When Ruby unravels at last, she must face the demons that pursue her.

Ledger of the Open Hand looks at the intimate power of money and emotional debt through the eyes of a woman trying to grab hold of her own life. Beholden to a shrewd friend and burdened by family obligations and guilt, Meriel-Claire (MC) finally stumbles into what she’s been missing. She falls in love and finds her calling as a debt counsellor in the midst of a national financial crisis. But balancing the books for strangers is easier than reconciling her own complicated relationships. Regrets and deficits accumulate until MC must decide what she owes to those she loves.

In the early 1900s a young and newly wed Leona Merrigan sets out from the Newfoundland community of Three Brooks to find a better life in Knock Harbour on the island's Cape Shore. After some happy years, tragedy strikes when she unwittingly brings disaster upon her home. Years later, William Cantwell, a politician tormented by regret, finds Leona in Knock Harbour, virtually alone but for her only child, a deaf girl named Dulcie. Both William and Leona come to focus on Dulcie's education as a way to mend their shattered lives.

On the day she gives birth to her first child, Claire Walsh's husband James tells her he's been having an affair and now's the right time to leave her. Right for who exactly? Exhausted, tearful and a tiny bit furious, Claire can't think of what to do. So she follows the instincts of all self-respecting adults in tricky situations. . . and runs home to Mum and Dad. But while her parents are sympathetic, Claire's younger sisters are less so. Helen wants to share the new toy (baby Kate), while Anna is too busy having out-of-her-head experiences.

Lara Lington has always had an overactive imagination, but suddenly that imagination seems to be in overdrive. Normal professional twenty-something young women don’t get visited by ghosts. Or do they?
When the spirit of Lara’s great-aunt Sadie—a feisty, demanding girl with firm ideas about fashion, love, and the right way to dance—mysteriously appears, she has one request: Lara must find a missing necklace that had been in Sadie’s possession for more than seventy-five years, because Sadie cannot rest without it. 

For every woman trying to strike that impossible balance between work and home-and pretending that she has-and for every woman who has wanted to hurl the acquaintance who coos admiringly, "Honestly, I just don't know how you do it," out a window, here's a novel to make you cringe with recognition and laugh out loud. With fierce, unsentimental irony, Allison Pearson's novel brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the twenty-first century. Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager and mother of two.

Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father Jules is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance.

No one at school knew that fifteen-year-old Aggie and her mother were hoarders until the Idiot Boys. That made her even more a target of bullies than she was before. At home, aka The Dump, her loneliness and despair are further punctuated by her mother's alcoholism, neglect, and paranoia. But Aggie is a warrior and she devises a plan to fight back —–a plan that enlists a few of the other misfits at school. The plan isn't an easy one, though, and when she is beaten by a group of girls, she finds strength and encouragement from some unlikely sources.

Deep Girls tells stories that defy the conventions of young adult literature. The clichés of fictional relationships are tossed aside, and instead we read about girls whose relationships with their families are like the real relationships readers see in the world around them. There are stories showing family members at their worst: a girl must stand up against expectations put on her by her parents and boyfriend; a sibling's assault on a parent drives a young woman to dark thoughts, and admiration for a rule-bending classmate; an ill grandmother is cruel to her daughter.

One more year. That’s all Gunnar has to wait until graduation. More importantly, it’s one more year until he’ll feel safe to come out.
Gunnar has kept his sexuality a secret — only his twin sister knows he’s gay. Coming out now would make him the target of homophobic bullies at his school. But a year is a long time, especially when life starts moving at its own pace, and Gunnar meets guys he wants to date.
Set in rural Alberta, Under the Radar is the uplifting story of a teen who dreams of a life in which he can be himself.