National Network for Equitable Library Service

A story of mean drunks and happy ones, and of the women who often outlive them, My Grandmother's Pill is a rollercoaster ride through three generations of abuse and addiction. On the heels of divorce, Maude's relationship with Seamus sets the scene for her struggle to break free.

A Tale of Beauty is the story of five young women who have banded together as the Ugly Sisterhood. Chastity, a devout Catholic, has made a mission of saving her brother from a dissolute lifestyle. Diana is isolated by her own impossible standards. Sue, once hurt by a man, has made a game of avenging herself against his entire gender. Denise, the pragmatic office girl, escapes into realms of fantasy by night. Finally, there is Belle, who created and oversees the Sisterhood. She has managed to gain a hold over each of her sisters by manipulating their weaknesses and desires.

Andrea has an unusual sense of smell. She grows up to be a pheromone researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a perfume maker in Paris. But one idea haunts her: who is her real father? Is it the man her family says is her father, or is it his live-in companion? Andrea follows them to San Remo, where she tests her hypothesis, with startling results that disrupt her family on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this satirical take on the goings on in the halls of academia, Christian private-college style, Ricapito tells the story of Bert Russo, a naive professor who learns the hard way that making waves (especially political ones) can lead to dire consequences. In the end, having exposed the hypocrisy and two-faced actions of his colleagues and having lost both his wife and job, Bert is finally at peace with himself.

Set in New York, Tehran, Port au Prince and Tegucigalpa, Octopus Intelligence tells the story of two desperate men. One, a former intelligence contractor suffering from a mysterious ailment, has returned home to find an oblique message spelled out on his bedroom floor. Another, a self-medicating paleontologist, has just discovered a four hundred million year old transitional cephalopod in the Moroccan desert. One will be liberated, and the other lost, in this extraordinary novel of paranoia, politics, scientific rivalry, pain management and postmodern theatre.

Songwriter Michel Laflamme is stuck in traffic on Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge. While waiting for police to try to talk down a potential suicide, Michel turns on the radio and hears his wife, Bijou, founding member of Beaupré, the seminal Quebec folk-rock group. The music takes Michel across a 30-year span of memory, through the emotional and political upheavals of his own life and that of his Belle Province.

A finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award! The Combals are not unacquainted with death: they have never quite recovered from the loss of one of them in childhood. And now, on Valentine's Day, they are losing another. Guddy races to see her sister, Jerry and Bjarne avoid the phone and its news, Jean finds himself on a beach, and Annie fends off her mother's persistent questions about what's happening. And Therese tries to forgive them all before it's too late.

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection! Finalist for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women.

In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge.

Shortlisted for a 2009 Lambda Award When Auden learns he’s HIV-positive, he decides to head for Toronto, leaving behind Sudbury and his old personality. Determined to construct a whole new Auden, he gets a new job, new clothes, new habits, new friends, new ways of speaking. And all of these things seem to be leading him inevitably towards Steve, Steve Reinke.