National Network for Equitable Library Service

The debut book by Hasan Namir is a revelatory novel about being queer and Muslim, set in war-torn Iraq in 2003. Ramy is a closeted university student whose parents have died, and who lives under the close scrutiny of his strict brother and sister-in-law. They exert pressure on him to find a wife, leaving him anguished and struggling to find a balance between his sexuality, religion, and culture.

A soucouyant is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore, and a symbol here of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas. This first novel set in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, focuses on a Canadian-born son who despairingly abandons his Caribbean-born mother suffering from dementia. The son returns after two years to confront his mother but also a young woman who now mysteriously occupies the house.

Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba.

When twenty-two-year-old Marla finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she wishes for a family, but faces precariousness: an uncertain future with her talented, exacting boyfriend, Liam; constant danger from her roommate, Dani, a sometime prostitute and entrenched drug addict; and the unannounced but overwhelming needs of her younger brother, Gavin, whom she has brought home for the first time from deaf school. Forcing her hand is Marla's fetal alcohol syndrome, which sets her apart but also carries her through.

Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John's. With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they've inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other's intentions. As the sisters discover the house's dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.

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.

"You" and L, a mysterious third gender runaway, hit the road on a mission to find the meaning of life. Traveling by plane, bus and car, You run into trouble with the cops, mourn a family tragedy, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, attend a retirement party, come to terms with a broken heart, and discover that all roads lead back to where You started - in the flowers drawn by two little girls in coloured chalk on the sidewalk

Everything is just a little more difficult for poor thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. "Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte," her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it's good advice because it's while working at Frank's coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a NYC modern dance company.

A whimsical and misanthropic imagining of Emily Dickinson's life. Paper Towns is a novelized account of Emily Dickinson's life, focusing on her childhood, the homes she lived in throughout her life, her family relationships, and her gradual reclusiveness, as she becomes consumed by getting words down on paper, and writing becomes an end in itself. Dickinson's childhood seems idyllic, and the headstrong Emily is both serious and fanciful. As she presses flowers between the pages of heavy books to preserve them, she reflects that books drink the water of flowers.