National Network for Equitable Library Service

What’s in a name? Personal misfortune, or so it would appear if your name happens to be "Flam Grub." This touching contemporary novel shows how our lives are entwined with our names and how our destinies are never certain. Full of humour and sadness, quirky wit, and quiet moments of beauty, Flam Grub tells the tale of a young man’s misadventures and his retreat to the security of reading books, work in a bookstore, and a career as an undertaker until fame unexpectedly comes his way.

What does it mean to be a nobody? How does it feel to be a somebody? And why is it so hard to be ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Nobodies, a darkly comedic collection in which a neurotic teenager experiences his first rejection; a stalker emails her favourite movie star; a young man wages war against God; and an aspiring philosopher tries to save the world from itself. In seventeen genre-bending stories, Nobodies explores the paradoxes of status anxiety, the pitfalls of fame, and the dialectics of identity in the twenty-first century.

Writer Danny Bayle’s life is in shambles. His true love has left him and his grandfather—the last and most important influence in his life—has just passed away. Danny has spent the last few months languishing, unable to write a single word, but at the urging of a friend ventures out into the world in an attempt to jumpstart a new life, befriending in the process an interesting assortment of characters including an author, a musician, an artist, and an elderly retired nurse.

Cell: no service. Email: down. Internet: off. TV: nothing. Radio: static. Communication: minimal. Chaos: unstoppable. Press Any Key to Start. PR hack Tristan Schultz is buried deep in the endless code of Millennial life, slogging away for a major pharmaceutical company in Seattle. Hopelessly drowning in a world of texts, emails, Tweets and status updates, he’s light years from a family he once had. His mother deceased, he’s lost touch with his only sibling, a sister he keeps in contact through Facebook, and a father who’s now shown up at his doorstep unannounced.

Aaron Cordic and Samantha Riske are a couple of twenty-something hypochondriacs living in east-end Toronto. While Aaron works part-time at a bathroom supply store, donning surgical masks, plastic gloves, and a backpack full of sanitary products, Samantha hides herself away in their apartment, tip-toeing around naked and spying on the neighbours. Between paranoid trips to the doctor and extremely intimate examinations of each other's bodies, they’ve managed to eke out an isolated and highly sterilized existence.

Well into his forties, Derrick Rowe finds himself chasing stray women and stealing cash from the bookstore he manages. Having decided it’s time to stop spinning his wheels, he’s recently turned to robbing banks. Meanwhile, he bails his friend Jack Lofton out of jail, a burly fellow in an alcoholic free-fall of his own. Rowe soon enlists both Lofton and a tough young clerk at the bookstore in another heist, setting the stage for an armed bank robbery, a drive-by shooting, and further complications for all.

Malcolm Bidwell is young, smart, and ambitious—and he’s just been hired by mistake by newly elected Premier Steven Davis as his “go-to guy” for every political mess that needs cleaning up. And there are plenty of messes—from a cabinet minister caught in a vice sting to the premier’s animal cruelty charge for killing a crow. Negotiating his way through the treacherous and wickedly funny corridors of power, Malcolm is forced to make difficult choices: between what’s right and what’s expedient, and between his old friends and his new career.

Vector Sorn—intellectual and athletic prodigy—witnesses the tragic death of his mother when he is just fourteen years old. For the next four years, he does his best to maintain a sense of purpose, and at eighteen sets his sights on Quest University. The night before he departs, his grandparents give him his mother’s journal, a tome filled with daily entries dating back to her own youth. When he finally brings himself to read it, a decades-old secret is revealed and Vector vows vengeance.

An inexperienced CSIS agent, Lucas Young, infiltrates a collective of performance and conceptual artists dubbed “Apollo’s Army.” After assuming the identity of an experimental poet, Lucas joins the group on a cross-country tour of Canada in the summer of 2010. Along the way, this 21st century troupe of court jesters crash a poetry reading in Banff, represent a fictional country in a multi-cultural parade in Calgary, resurrect Louis Riel as a guitar-god in Saskatchewan, heckle debaters at an arts symposium in Winnipeg, and storm a Toronto printing press to publish their manifesto.

From the author of the novels Love on the Killing Floor and Dragging the River, Trevor Clark’s new collection of stories covers broad territory, from an addict’s confessions to the corruption of academia, in such diverse locales as Jamaica and the UK.