National Network for Equitable Library Service

La vie est souvent ponctuée de départs. Que l'on vive en Europe, en Afrique ou en Amérique, nous devons tôt ou tard dire adieu ou voir des êtres chers partir sans crier gare. Départs s'attarde à huit destins, comme autant de voies qui divergent, permettant aux personnages de se réapproprier leur vie et de faire place au renouveau. Dans Départs, l'auteur lauréat David Baudemont explore avec beaucoup d'acuité les détails de la mobilité des êtres, dépeint les émotions et scrute les effets des séparations, qu'elles soient souhaitées ou imposées.

Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra's Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu Islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family-and her killer-alter in her absence.

Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis.

Dominoes at the Crossroads maps an alternate Canada—one crisscrossed by a Caribbean diaspora seeking futures, portals to the past, and music. In this collection of stories, Kaie Kellough's characters navigate race, history, and coming of age by way of their confessions and dreams.

You will never know what really happened to Lech or any of us. We mean nothing by it, darling. It is a silent agreement we all have with ourselves, that nothing will ever make us prisoners again, not even memory.'#x9D; Set primarily in the neighbourhood of fictional Copernicus Avenue, Andrew Borkowski's debut collection of short stories is a daring, modern take on life in Toronto's Polish community in the years following World War II.

This much-anticipated second collection of short stories by Carol Windley captures the shimmering, mutable light of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island, where a diverse and unforgettable group of characters confront sorrows and triumphs.

The pain tree tells stories that speak to all aspects of Jamaican life.

Susan Compo captures the lives of aspiring musicians, scenesters, and obsessive fans—lives in which reality is a constant threat to cherished illusions, and death, while never far away, is not always the end of the story.

The first book in English by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei, Shenzheners is inspired by the young city of Shenzhen, a market town north of Hong Kong that became a Special Economic Zone in 1980 as an experiment in introducing capitalism to Communist China. A city in which everyone is a newcomer, Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre. Hailed as a Chinese Dubliners, the original collection was named one of the Most Influential Chinese Books of the Year in 2013, with most of the stories appearing in Best Chinese Stories.

Connecting is not easy, but proximity is unbearable. The characters in these brilliant and intense stories are longing for escape, but they inevitably find themselves homesick. Chih-Ying Lay, a Taiwanese-Canadian, probes a desperate need for beauty and belonging - and the cost when what is found is the opposite of both. Lay's characters are outsiders, whether queer, indigenous, unloved or lost, and each discovers that home is not the sanctuary it was meant to be.