National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 1940s Vancouver the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building. The RCMP are rounding up 'suspicious' young men, fishing boats and property are being seized, and internment camps are only months away.

A 15th-century portrait painter, grieving the sudden death of his lover, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until a monk assigns him the task of copying a manuscript - though he is illiterate. His work slowly heals him and continues the tradition that had, centuries earlier, grown the monastery's library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother's mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne's life. This is a fictionalized account of Suzanne's life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum.

A little girl with a beard must find herself a home in this contemporary fairy tale. It's 1944, and an eleven-year-old girl lives with her parents in a little village in rural Quebec. Her mother is very sad, and her father has vanished because this little girl has suddenly sprouted a full beard. When townpeople come for her, she escapes into the wintry night.

In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly recreates the life of Berthe Morisot, the sole female member of the renowned group of artists known as the Impressionists. Inspired by true events, One Madder Woman charts her complicated relationship with her sister and rival, Edma, and her tumultuous love affair with Édouard Manet, the charismatic enfant terrible of the Paris Salon, against a backdrop of upheaval and war in mid-19th-century Paris.

Set in an unnamed Pakistani city shortly after Partition, the lives of Ustad Ramzi, one of the greatest wrestlers of the land, who is now old and warmed only by the memories of his past, and the equally renowned Gohar Jan, a courtesan whose kotha once welcomed lords of the land but is now in danger of being shut down, unravel.

Days of Moonlight takes place mostly in Turkey between 1924 and 2010, and spans the lives of three generations who move as refugees from Crete to Izmir and finally to Toronto. The novel centres on the life and loves of Mehtap, a woman in her mid-twenties with a delicious sense of humour. While working as a secretary at a zipper factory in Izmir, she falls madly in love with her boss for whom she has to lie and wrap presents for his mistress and his wife. Her love for him doesn't change when she also falls in love with her friend, Nuray.

In 1610, John Guy established a small colony in Cupids, Newfoundland, on the very edge of a world unknown to Europeans. Two years later, he brought a shipment of supplies to his all-male settlement: 70 goats, 10 heifers, 2 bulls, and 16 women. A Roll of the Bones tells the story of some of these nameless women by tracing the journeys of three young people--Ned Perry, Nancy Ellis, and Kathryn Gale--who leave Bristol, England, for a life in the struggling community. Ned dreams of altering his fate with the promise of a New World.

Edith Stoker's father is building a wall in their backyard. A very, very high wall - a brick bulwark in his obsessive war against their hated neighbour Edward Black. It is 1969, and far away, preparations are being made for man to walk upon the moon. Meanwhile, in the Stokers' shabby home in the East Midlands, Edith remains a virtual prisoner, with occasional visits from her grotesque and demanding Aunt Vivian serving as the only break in the routine.

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day.