National Network for Equitable Library Service

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister's apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man's identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador.

Rose LeClair has everything she ever wanted: a successful career as a box office starlet, a handsome, successful Hollywood husband, more fans and money than she could have hoped for, her face on the cover of every check-out magazine. And she is about to take her own life. At the last moment, however, she recoils from the act, and tries to imagine a future of even greater possibility.

Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality'and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.

Prompted by a mysterious summons from his past, a man known only as 'The Super' begins an investigation into maternal neglect by a privileged Toronto family. As the case deepens, revealing a web of systemic crime and depravity, The Super undertakes a series of adjustments: his word for the personal interventions that he conducts on behalf of the powerless. These increasingly chaotic retributions soon pull him into a spiral of brutal violence. Working within six-to-eight week windows of hyper-time periods of near-sleepless activity and hyper-awareness that precede his own mental collapse.

When she is confined to a nursing home after a series of debilitating strokes, Ruth Tyler struggles to accept the loss of her independence. Suddenly, having endless hours to sit and think, she begins to face the issues in her life she could once avoid, particularly her estrangement from her daughter, Annie. As Ruth awaits Annie's visit, she recalls the stormy relationship she had with her own mother and how profoundly it shaped her life.

Danny McMillan never knew that his father was abusing his mother, until a night of violence that shattered his family forever. Watching in the courtroom as his father is sentenced, Danny struggles with divided loyalties – to his mother on one side and to his father whom he wants to forgive on the other. After one trial is over, another begins for Danny. Social services and the police convince Danny’s mother that they must go into a victim protection program. Danny is asked to leave everything behind – his home, his friends, and the love and support of his grandparents.

2017 Evergreen Award, Forest of Reading — Nominated A sister. A baby. A man who watches from the trees. Fara and her husband buy a house with a disturbing history that reawakens memories of her own family tragedy. Maddy still lives in the house, once a hippie commune, where her daughter was kidnapped twenty-seven years ago. Rose grew up isolated with her mother in the backwoods north of Montreal. Now in the city, she questions the silence and deception that shaped her upbringing.

2016 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction Selection Anna has always been so level-headed, so easy-going, so talented and funny. How could anyone have guessed she wanted to die? Anna is not like other people. She’s always felt like she didn’t belong: not with other kids, not with her family, not in her body. It isn’t until her grandparents are killed in a tragic accident, however, that Anna starts to feel untethered. She begins to wonder what it would be like if she didn’t exist, and the thought of escaping the aimless drifting is the only thing that brings her comfort.

2015 Arthur Ellis Award — Nominated, Best First Novel A terrible tragedy tears a family apart. In a serene city in the extravagant mid-eighties, the privileged Warne family is victimized when their talented and artistic eleven-year-old daughter Lizbett is sexually slain. How can any family endure such horror? In an intimate exploration of grief, the surviving family members struggle with their mourning. Hildy, a loving but abused Great Dane, also in need of healing, joins the family and becomes part of their journey back to normalcy.