National Network for Equitable Library Service

Think the world can’t get any crazier? Think again. Set in near-future Toronto, Skeet Love tells the story of Shane, a conspiracy theorist and aspiring rapper; Nina, his girlfriend; and Brit, the couple’s lover. Wildly suspecting the threesome is under surveillance by a secretive religious cult, Shane moves the group to seek refuge with his father, a smuggler and taxidermist. And then the truth really gets weird. Craig Francis Power’s third novel is an uber-cool drug and sex-fuelled critique of the world we think we know.

Ingrid and Norah have an unconventional upbringing -- growing up in a motel, raised by their mother and her partner. The girls' grandmother, Ada, who owns the Blue Moth, has always kept them at a distance. But when she buys a piano for the motel, that all changes. Years later in England, training to be a soloist, Ingrid loses her voice and must decide what to do. She hears from Norah, who's reviving a party that began during their childhood to celebrate the arrival of mysterious and elusive blue moths.

This is the story of a small group of English immigrants and their struggle to establish a community and livelihood in the forbidding environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in mid-environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in the mid-1800s.

In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew.

This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, and the occasional recipe. Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury Steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, bird’s nest soup sets the stage for Christmas plum pudding; where racism simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe. An exciting new edition of Fred Wah’s best-selling bio-fiction, on the 10th anniversary of its original publication, with added text and an all new afterword by the author.

After a long series of professional and personal upheavals, Detective Lane begins his latest adventure happy, at peace, and enjoying life with his partner Arthur, their children Christine and Matt, and his able new partner, RCMP officer Keely Saliba. But when the body of a young boy is unearthed ten years after he was reported missing, Lane?s investigation into the crime puts him in conflict with a powerful and charismatic Calgary real estate developer and restaurateur - a cunning sociopath whose desire to suppress any threat to his empire will endanger the safety of Lane's own family.

Chorus of Mushrooms heralds the debut of a young Japanese Canadian feminist, Hiromi Goto. Until the publication of Chorus of Mushrooms in 1994, the primary voice heard from Japanese Canadians was that of the people interned during World War II. Hiromi Goto examines the immigration experience of the Japanese Canadian beyond war and into present day Alberta. Celebrating cultural differences as a privilege, Chorus of Mushrooms explores the shifts and collisions of culture through the lives of three generations of women in a Japanese family living in a small prairie town.

After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and even decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice.

The third book in Roy Innes' mystery series sends RCMP Inspector Coswell and the newly promoted Sergeant Blakemore to the rugged district of West Cariboo in British Columbia, where a young Mountie constable has been found dead in his burnt-out cruiser at the bottom of a ravine. But what looks like an accident quickly reveals itself as a poorly disguised murder.

A chance discovery of a sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister leads RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes on an investigation: how did a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC end up at a garage sale in rural Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later? As Arabella sifts through long-forgotten letters and buried memories, she unearths heartbreaking truths of her family history and in the process also resolves a century-old murder.