National Network for Equitable Library Service

It's 1994 and Pete Curtis can't wait to get out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Already, he's playing drums in a band whose songs belong on mix-tapes everywhere. Even though his new girlfriend seems underwhelmed, he knows it's just a matter of time before he and his pals break big. Ten years later, Pete is stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his former best friend and bandmate is a bona fide rock star.

A fractured depiction of life after a death in a bifurcated Alberta/Saskatchewan community.

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa. Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingland, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.

Calgary's Detective Lane deals with complications on the homefront with the birth of his nephew Indiana, and a series of gruesome killings that shakes his partner to the core.

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day.

A moving story of protest and determination, Nutau's Cap tells of a young Innu girl, Nanas. The low-level flying of NATO supersonic jets disrupts her family's traditional way of life, and endangers both them and the wildlife they depend upon, so Nanas' father and the other members of the Sheshatshiu community decide to protest by occupying the military's runways. Nanas is proud and eager to join in the social action, but then her father is arrested.

Storyteller Andy Jones and illustrator Darka Erdelji have joined forces again to produce the funny and epic, Jack, the King of Ashes. This time Jack, the "King of Ashes," spends all his time hove off in the coal box, until one day he shakes off his ashes and sets out on an adventure that includes sneaky robbers, a "famous missing princess with reward attached," an always-surprising canine sidekick, a royal wedding, a lovelorn rooster-puppet, a conniving ship's captain, corpses, curses, kisses, a coat and a whole lot more!

Under the sway of a charismatic stranger, five friends at an isolated lakeside cottage find their idyll unravelling, leaving two of them -- Lydia Eadon and Dorian Grant -- trapped in an explosion of violence that shatters their young lives and propels them past the borders of conventional morality. Forty years later when a body is unearthed from the scene of their revels, Lydia -- a book editor in San Francisco -- and Dorian -- a vagabond actor -- are plunged into a terrible reckoning with the past.

When Stella Magnusson, beautiful, talented but devious, turns up dead at the Cullen Village dump in Manitoba's Interlake, Margo Wishart and her Book Club take notice. So does Corporal Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP. Soon they are in a race to discover the killer as the temperature dips to minus forty and it looks like someone else is going to freeze to death.

When millworkers in Roberval, a northern Quebec logging town, go on strike, the conflict rips the close-knit community apart, and despite the workers' solidarity, their individual struggles and demands further escalate tensions within the group. They remain united by the desire to escape poverty and exact revenge on their boss, but when Brian Ferland decrees a lockout and awakens in them a buried rage, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashingly cosmopolitan newcomer from Montreal.