National Network for Equitable Library Service

Lucien and Nataša might have slipped toward love, if her past in Sarajevo hadn't caught up with her. Nataša finds work modeling for a painter in Toronto, but he is murdered. Nataša disappears that night, running for her life. Her vanishing is connected to the discovery of a video, secretly filmed in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Butterfly is a novel that charts a controlled descent through the dark legacy of war and the underbelly of the global art scene ... into a world ruled by a desperate hope for impossible redemption.

On the Edge tells the story of Emerald Lake Visser, an unhappy fourteen-year-old who came to live on her aunt and uncle's farm when she was orphaned at age five. A misfit in her community and at school, her only real friend is an elderly woman, Jess, who teaches her to sail. Emma's a natural sailor, as if she's been on a sailboat her whole life. When Jess dies, it's revealed that she was Emma's grandmother. After receiving a letter that her mother may be living in the Bahamas, Emma runs away on her grandmother's boat, the Edge, to find her.

After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to Kelli, her older sister. Overwhelmed with grief and the daily needs of Kelli, who was born with a developmental disability, Karen begins to feel consumed by the isolation of her new role. On top of that, she's weighed down with guilt over her years spent keeping Kelli and their independent-to-a-fault mother, Irene, at arm's length.

Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly unhinged Joseph Reiser forms "Walden", a collective of Luddite devotees-most still in their teens.

Ryan Chandler, a successful but apathetic student, drops out of university and is soon leading a rudderless existence. Living at home, working a dead-end part-time job, but deeply dissatisfied, he accepts a rare opportunity to pursue his own research project. Soon installed in the German city of Karlsruhe, Ryan throws himself into his project, studying aspects of the first-ever international scientific meeting and focussing on the contributions to that meeting made by one of the delegates, a man who ultimately becomes a famous Italian chemist.

After dealing with the grizzly murder of a sexual assault victim near her cottage in Huntsville, Ontario, Robin MacFarland, the feisty Home and Garden reporter for a major Toronto paper, feels she must go elsewhere for a peaceful family holiday. She, her cop boyfriend Ralph, and her adult kids, travel to the beautiful long sand beaches on the South Shore of Nova Scotia for a few weeks in August.

The De Boer family are tobacco growers, working on terraces in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Life is hard, and the father, Augusto, occasionally supplements their income by smuggling tobacco across the border into Austria. Sometimes he takes his daughter Jole with him, and father and daughter journey together on the perilous route over the mountains. But Augusto mysteriously never returns from one of these trips, and Jole, driven to provide for her family, inherits her father's smuggling route.

Ava is in Shanghai with Pang Fai to visit her ailing friend Xu when a triad war breaks out in Hong Kong. Sammy Wing, an old enemy of Ava's who has twice tried to kill her, has enlisted the aid of his nephew Carter - the new Mountain Master of Sha Tin - to reclaim control of his old territory, Wanchai, from Xu's men.There is nothing subtle about the Wings' methods. Xu's most trusted enforcer, Lop, has been shot, and six of his street soldiers kidnapped. The Wings threaten to execute them unless Xu's men vacate Wanchai immediately.

Having retreated to the idyllic Polynesian island of Bora Bora to savour and lament the lost past, Harry Lindstrom finds himself drawn into a strange relationship with a raven-haired, B-list movie actress and her invalid husband. Harry learns from the amiably grotesque Inspector Theophil Queequeg that they are leaders of a virulent religious movement, and that the woman is far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined. Back in Toronto, she reappears with a disturbing capacity to make Harry wonder about the moral justifications for murder.

Newfoundland. 1942. Hitler's U-boats ravage the Atlantic, sinking warships and merchant vessels alike. The world's fate hinges on the fight for this ocean, and Germany has launched a daring operation that promises to tip the scales in its favour. The Allies's best chance is Frank Carousel, a Canadian military policeman, and Jack, a two-fisted, Newfoundland cop. Their adventure will take them from Newfoundland's rocky coast to the alleys of its rapidly changing capital city, St. John's.