National Network for Equitable Library Service

Driving back home from an early-morning surfing trip with two friends, Simon Limbres is involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted country road. Framed within the twenty-four hours following the crash, this novel describes the resulting heart transplant as life is transferred from this teenage boy and given to a woman close to death.

Befriending Traci Calloway Cole is the best thing Simone Phillips has ever done. She begins copying her role model. Not because she wants to be Traci. She just wants to be exactly like Traci.

War survivor Teddy Todd is a would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather who must navigate a rapidly changing world, living in a future he never expected to have.

When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades.

Tom Carruso left home soon after Lizzie Burdett disappeared under a darkening cloud of suspicion, and now he's back for the inquest into Lizzie's disappearance, intent on telling his side of the story.

Winner of the 2013 Alberta Readers' Choice Award Rebee Shore's life is fragmented. She's forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth. The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother's fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators'family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself'her family's dark past, and the core of her mother's despair, are slowly revealed.

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and fatherare having trouble. Meanwhile, the world's in meltdown, and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

Everyone talks about falling in love, but falling in friendship can be just as captivating. When Neela Devaki's song is covered by internet-famous artist Rukmini, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But as Rukmini's star rises and Neela's stagnates, jealousy and self-doubt creep in. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, one career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the center of an internet firestorm.

Vicky, a writer in Vancouver in the early 1960s doesn't consider herself the type of woman who would end up in a bad relationship. Struggling to come to terms with herself, she navigates an emotionally abusive relationship with Mik, a violent logger and ex-con. Mik and Vicky's physical, often violent affair offers an honest and unflinching look at relationships and female suffering. Crossings caused a furor when it was first published and was banned from some feminist bookstores.