National Network for Equitable Library Service

A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in a small town.

A critical and commercial success in German, Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings, and their eventual tragic destruction. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, who wishes only to forget his past, this highly original novel recreates a vanished Vienna with salty humour and humanity.

Ellie Lucan's about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She's got a doctorate, her husband's a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at the local Montessori. When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her two sons to spend the summer with in her hometown. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons.

'So,' she says. 'Who died tonight?' Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes.

Norman Levine was a permanent outsider, by temperament and by choice as Polish born immigrant, as resident alien, as writer, as Jew and he observed life from the margins with an unsentimental eye. Raised in Ottawa after immigrating, Levine served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World war. He then lived an itinerant life for a time before settling down in the community of St. Ives in England, becoming close friends with painters such as Francis Bacon and Patrick Heron.

Hitting the Charts brings back into print stories that go as far back as 1980, offering up the full range of Leon Rooke's voice and accomplishment. These are stories as improvisations, as performances, stories which push the boundaries of form and function, as free from constraint as a Monk solo and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. A new sort of literary riff, then, a dazzling display of language and sensibility, deserving of its own unique adjective: Rookian.

Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, in the late stages of Alzheimer's, has become inexplicably anti-Semitic. Alison, his young suburban protege, has never heard of the Holocaust. When Alison notices a tattoo on the arm of one of her older clients, and then one of her gay friends is brutally murdered by a group of skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey into a world of hate and confusion. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly declining Malcolm with her.

Peter Bayle - heavy drinker, philosopher to-be, anemic lover - somehow finds himself in Kansas, writing a feature article on middle America's newfound love for hockey. There he meets, among others, a morphine-injecting Reverend, a reviled reporter, a teenage drug dealer, and an ex-crack-addicted figure-skating team mascot.

This startlingly original collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Metcalf-Rooke Award. Set in locales and time periods as varied as nineteenth century England, contemporary Spain, and postwar Alberta, these five stories and two novellas introduce us to characters whose obsessions occupy the borderlands between fantasy and reality. In the title story, the half-black grand-daughter of slaves becomes an exotic dancer in New York during the First World War -- and also develops a passion for goldfish.

First published in 1972, Going Down Slow is an intense and very funny novel about one mans attempt to maintain his sanity, and his sense of humour, in the face of mounting odds. Metcalf's young hero, David Appleby, a young school teacher just over from Britain, is pitted against small-mindedness, prejudice, and temptations that are generations old. The writing is, as one would expect of anything by Metcalf, of the highest order. Going Down Slow is a sharp and biting satire, and an unforgettable novel.