National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 1940s Vancouver the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building. The RCMP are rounding up 'suspicious' young men, fishing boats and property are being seized, and internment camps are only months away.

In these sixteen stories, Christopher Gudgeon, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Song of Kosovo, takes a heartbreaking and hilarious look into the lives, loves, sexual obsessions and delusions that inform a grand cast of off-kilter characters.

At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body.

Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada's preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can't really tell for sure.

... Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves we might not like. There's a political dimension to this. One thread running through this book is the threat of environmental collapse - drought, massive bee death, dwindling salmon stock - and humans' awkward interventions. ..." (The Globe and Mail) "Her characters possess an abundance of hard-luck stories, true, but she writes them as sometimes wrong and sometimes foolish and hence eminently human in their fallibility.

The long-lost fiction of avant-garde hero bpNichol collected into one groundbreaking volume. 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.

Dr. Edith Vane is nicely ensconced at the University of Inivea and is about to see her dissertation on Beulah Crump-Withers published. All should be well. Except for her broken washing machine, her backstabbing fellow professors, a cutthroat new dean - and the fact that the sentient and malevolent Crawley Hall has decided it wants them all out.

Although the Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and solve the puzzle.

A novel about silence, tinged with the fantastic, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace sneaks the brutality of grief into your imagination. Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile - things haven't been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.

The lives of three families intersect in the hallways of an apartment block in a Montreal neighborhood. Kevin lives in 62. His mom took off but it's okay because his dad's a wrestler and he always wins. Even when he gets laid off from his job. Melissa is in 64. She has to look after her siblings because there's a restraining order that means her mom can't be within fifty metres of them. So when Melissa needs to tell her something, she leaves a note on the sidewalk near where her mother is looking for customers.