National Network for Equitable Library Service

Like a Québécois Bridget Jones's Diary, Marie-Renée Lavoie's Autopsy of a Boring Wife tells the hysterically funny and ultimately touching tale of forty-eight-year-old Diane, a woman whose husband leaves her and is having an affair because, he says, she bores him. Diane takes the charge to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restoring trust in herself and others that is at the same time an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of marriage in the twenty-first century.

Ever since her mom died of Huntington's disease, Logan has been in a permanent state of neutral. Her dad has been depressed and lonely, but Logan is . . . something else. So much so that she doesn't even see that her best friend, Cole, is head over heels in love with her. To make matters worse, Logan's dad is now hosting a bereavement group in their basement. That was Logan's place to escape; it's where she keeps her darkroom and where she and Cole indulge their mutual love of cinema and black-and-white photography.

Lucien and Nataša might have slipped toward love, if her past in Sarajevo hadn't caught up with her. Nataša finds work modeling for a painter in Toronto, but he is murdered. Nataša disappears that night, running for her life. Her vanishing is connected to the discovery of a video, secretly filmed in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Butterfly is a novel that charts a controlled descent through the dark legacy of war and the underbelly of the global art scene ... into a world ruled by a desperate hope for impossible redemption.

Thirty-two-year-old Kang is a new immigrant in Toronto. Having an older sister who was raped and suffers from the ensuing stigma in China, Kang is determined to remain a spinster, which has its own stigma in China, and she struggles with her fear and distrust of men. But Kang's story is not a hard luck story. She is an intelligent woman and a successful immigrant.

A Palace in Paradise is a novel about the complex Iranian refugee and immigrant community in Toronto and the way in which one woman's death changes the lives of many others. The people in this community are connected by family ties, cultural ties, romance, and the fact that, as immigrants, they not only share a culture, but they also share a past of political violence. Several were at one time imprisoned in Evin, a notorious jail in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lorato lives a comfortable but lonely life in her retirement years, alone in the home her husband had built in their rural village on the Kalahari in southern Africa. She becomes a grandmother when she adopts Lesedi after the death of a neighbour of from HIV-related causes. Then six more children come into Lorato's care, her biological grandchildren. Now primary caregiver for seven grandchildren, she struggles to feed them all, to teach them right from wrong, and traditional ways of life in a world shifting and modernizing.

Joe is the successful screenwriter behind a series of blockbuster movies, but his personal life is in shambles. He hasn't had a date in over eighteen years, and his relationship with the daughter he raised by himself has gone off the rails. Once a sweet and affectionate child, Sofia's personality changed dramatically in her early teens, and her increasingly explosive, irrational behavior has wreaked havoc on Joe's family back home in the Bronx.

Billy Stuart, the young raccoon leader of the Zintrepids Scout troop, aspires to be just like his grandfather, a globe-trotting adventurer who knows no fear. After accidentally traveling through time in pursuit of Grandpa, Billy and friends find themselves on the island of Crete, snout to snout with King Minos's Minotaur. It's a formidable challenge; Billy and his buddies have to escape the Minotaur, the labyrinth and King Minos's wrath and maybe, just maybe, find their way home!

When Pugg, dog to eighteenth-century printmaker William Hogarth, finds a leather portmanteau abandoned beneath his master's deathbed, the bereaved canine embarks on an inquiry to make sense of the disordered contents. Notes from a criminal investigation, letters between sisters, a pair of novels, and the personal reflection of one Sarah Scott lead Pugg on a journey through London's streets, high and low.

A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby's grandparent's immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny's life in 1920s Chicago-the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition-and Ruby's subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto.