National Network for Equitable Library Service

An Atlantic Books Today Editor's Pick. Lorna always wanted to stand out, but her career as a competitive swimmer was cut short by a knee injury. Cara, her daughter, tries hard to blend in, but when she has to fill in for her brother at a school pageant, she is overwhelmed by terror. Lorna is vain about her ability to shut out distractions. Cara can't control her scary thoughts. And while Lorna tries her best to move past life's early disappointments, Cara picks at the cracks in her family's story.

A gritty, Canadian Cormac McCarthy. A rich interplay between the characters and their surroundings, an environment that swarms the characters, sometimes inflicting harm. Drugs. Violence. Racism. Despair. The tiny, northern town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in the high-rise by the lake. In this visceral, emotionally raw, and completely absorbing collection, Carlucci takes his readers through the ravaged history of Franklin Place, from its construction during the Cold War to its demolition decades later.

The return of the western - with a definite Canadian twist. The man, the myth, the gun-toting legend. The man, the myth, the one-eyed legend: a frontier epic for fans of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy. In 1876, the fabled lawman Strother Purcell disappears into a winter storm in the mountains of British Columbia, while hunting down his outlawed half-brother. Sixteen years later, the wreck of Purcell resurfaces - derelict, homeless and one-eyed - in a San Francisco jail cell. And a failed journalist named Barrington Weaver conceives a grand redemptive plan.

It's 1908, and 16-year-old Charlotte O'Dell is forced to move away from her great Aunt Ginny in Victoria, and live and work at the St. Alice Hotel in order to make enough money to finish school. Her unruly red hair instantly makes her a new friend in Lizzie, though her equally fiery temperament doesn't go over quite as well with her boss, Mrs. Bannerman. It does, however, give her the opportunity to get to know the rest of the staff, and the guests, at the St. Alice.

It's just another boring summer for our teenaged narrator -- until Barbra arrives. An Ethiopian Jew, Barbra was brought to Israel at age five, a part of Operation Solomon, and now our narrator's well-intentioned father has brought her, as a teen, to their home for the summer. But Barbra isn't the docile and grateful orphan they expect, and soon our narrator, terrified of her and drawn to her in equal measure, finds himself immersed in compulsive psychosexual games with her, as she binge-drinks and lies to his family. Things go terribly wrong, and Barbra flees.

He tells her about cases he remembers. The two young women found in the forest, the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels, the casket that caught on fire at the funeral. He reveals the secrets of his profession. The powder that comes in a ketchup-sized packet and is injected into the cheeks for that blushing look, the candle wax used to reconstruct parts of a skull, the perfectly weighted stones in a repatriated soldier's casket. These are the notes of a life spent facing death, of a daughter trying to make sense of her father.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project.

Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of beloved writer bpNichol's published fiction. Originally appearing between 1968 and 1983, and representing almost the entire arc of Nichol's writing career, Nights on Prose Mountain is by turns heartbreaking, playful, and evocative. While Nichol's poetry is widely studied, researched and taught, his novels have remained out of print and are overdue for a new edition. Nichol's curiosity and craft, his exploration and exuberance, his lyricism and adventurousness are all on exhibit here.

We All Need to Eat, is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.

In a kind of Catherine Millet meets Roland Barthes baring of life with hints of the work of Chris Kraus, Sludge Utopia by Catherine Fatima is an auto-fictional novel about sex, depression, family, shaky ethics, ideal forms of life, girlhood, and coaching oneself into adulthood under capitalism. Using her compulsive reading as a lens through which to bring coherence to her life, twenty-five-year-old Catherine engages in a series of sexual relationships, thinking that desire is the key to a meaningful life.