National Network for Equitable Library Service

The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman's unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island. The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys.

Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.

After Morgan Wells's wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells - but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto. On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ever written.

Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector’s life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accused of terrorism—a crime of which he is innocent, yet ruthlessly punished. As he struggles to extricate himself from the clutches of a brutal and paranoid military regime, he learns that freedom comes at a terrible price.

Sky Rayburn, a somewhat eccentric but well-respected veterinarian, always had a troubled relationship with her daughter Moira. When Moira is killed in a car accident, Skye has no choice but to take in her two-year-old grandson Duncan. Maybe this time she will "get it right." Over the years, Skye creates a diary: Life Lessons for Duncan.

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.

The brilliant next novel from the fiercely talented author of Vanishing Monuments. On the morning of June 2, 2016, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, a mass that - three weeks later - will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world.

When Arabella Slominski Boot catches her loutish husband in bed with her best friend, she packs up, takes her son Kenny and drives to Louisiana to see her mother. Surrounded by eccentric characters, like a Harley-Davidson riding palm reader, a sexy seventy-year old jazz musician, a gun-toting hitchhiker, and a karate instructor stalker, just to name a few, Arabella comically finds herself as well as love. Some strong language and some descriptions of sex. 1998.

Après la mort de son père, Michel, fonctionnaire quadragénaire et blasé, décide de partir en Thaïlande pour goûter aux plaisirs exotiques. Il y rencontre Valérie, cadre dans une grande société de voyages, à qui il soufflera sa théorie sur les vraies motivations des Européens en quête de sensations fortes. Embarqué dans la lutte pour le profit à tout prix, où le corps est plus que jamais une marchandise, Michel jette un regard cynique sur la société occidentale. Il sera peut-être surpris de découvrir que l'être humain est encore capable de sentiments...