National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Underground Railroad was the passage to freedom for many slaves, but it was rife with dangers. While there were dedicated conductors and safe houses, there were also arduous nights in the mountains and days in threatening towns. For those who made it to Midnight, the code name given to Detroit, the Detroit River became their Jordan. And Canada became their "land of Canaan," the Promised Land where they could live freely in various black settlements under the protection of British law. One of these settlements was known as Dawn.

The classic chronicle of life and self-reliance in the great Northern Forest, now available in audio "Cache Lake Country is a gem for many reasons-a simple narrative, the ways in which it conveys the work-a-day joys and exertions of life in the wilderness, the woodscraft techniques it illustrates, and the slow and pleasurable way in which the soul of a serene man is revealed." -The New York Times Over half a century ago, John Rowlands set out by canoe into the wilds of Canada to survey land for a timber company.

National Best Seller
"Doug Smith always gets the first question in any Raptors press conference - as the dean of our press corps, he's been in the front row for every development over the past 25 years. There's no one better placed to write a history of our team's first quarter century." (Nick Nurse, head coach, Toronto Raptors)
Bringing Jurassic Park to your home, a celebration of Canada's most exciting team.

A gripping account of the unsolved death of an Indigenous teenager, and the detective determined to find her killer, set against the backdrop of a troubled city. On August 17, 2014, the body of fifteen-year old runaway Tina Fontaine was found in Winnipeg's Red River. It was wrapped in material and weighted down with rocks. Red River Girl is a gripping account of that murder investigation and the unusual police detective who pursued the killer with every legal means at his disposal.

An astonishing and powerful look at the ongoing opioid crisis North America is in the middle of a health emergency. Life expectancies are declining. Someone is dying every two hours in Canada from illicit drug overdose. Fentanyl has become a looming presence - an opioid more powerful, pervasive, and deadly than any previous street drug. The victims are many - and often not whom we might expect. They include the poor and forgotten but also our neighbours: professionals, students, and parents. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims have remained largely invisible. But not anymore.

A leading thinker on Canada's place in the world contends that our country's greatest untapped resource may be the three million Canadians who don't live here. Entrepreneurs, educators, humanitarians: an entire province's worth of Canadian citizens live outside Canada. Some will return, others won't. But what they all share is the ability, and often the desire, to export Canadian values to a world sorely in need of them. And to act as ambassadors for Canada in industries and societies where diplomatic efforts find little traction.

The greatest story never told, this formidable and gorgeous biography documents the amazing and controversial short life of Calixa Lavallée - the composer of O Canada - and the tumult of 19th-century North America. The story of O Canada is one of the great unknowns of our collective lives. No longer. This formidable and gorgeous tale documents the history of this song of a nation, from its origins in French Canada in the years just after Confederation to the surprisingly controversial story of its adoption as Canada's national anthem 100 years later.

An urgent, informed, intimate condemnation of the Canadian state and its failure to deliver justice to Indigenous people by national bestselling author and former Crown prosecutor Harold R. Johnson. The night of the decision in the Gerald Stanley trial for the murder of Colten Boushie, I received a text message from a retired provincial court judge. He was feeling ashamed for his time in a system that was so badly tilted.

The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be . Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation.

One of Canada's greatest inventors appraises his peers, with mixed results.