National Network for Equitable Library Service

Told in a completely distinctive and mesmerizing voice, Wan is the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline's carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

A dystopian horror story about music and mental illness. Nat and her bandmates in The Dead Layaways want to go on tour, but the demonic entities who run their city have other ideas, not to mention the dark cloud that hangs over everything stifles their creativity. This ruined place is not their home, and they have no idea how they ended up here, or where "home" even is. Is there really nothing but endless wasteland beyond the city limits, as the demons claim?

A novel about fatherhood, grief, unanswerable questions, and the small, magical moments that make up life. Keith has always striven to break rules as he navigates full-time parenting and supports the career of his successful photographer wife. Her unexpected illness and death leaves both him and his son Charlie in bits. When they take a road trip, a journey begins that does not end when they return home. Keith must deal with revelations that complicate his grief, even as Charlie's response is unsettling. Together, father and son connect with loved ones, strangers, and each other.

The first collection of short stories from award-winning author Tim Bowling, exploring childhood, work, and aging. Set on the west coast of British Columbia and in Edmonton, the fifteen stories in this collection focus on moments of transformation: between parents and their children, between men and women, between humans and the natural world. In this collection that's every bit as thoughtful and masterful as his past work, Tim Bowling explores the passing of time and the (sometimes desperate) desire for meaning to return, with depth and flashes of humour.

When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours: Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for.

Robert lost his father before he'd even been born, and was quickly abandoned by his young mother to be raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan. In another sense, though, Robert never lost his father, whose ghostly presence lingers in the young boy's life over the years by means of spectral "advice letters" on how to be a man. When Robert finds an old pump organ in a derelict farmhouse, he discovers a deep love of and talent for performing music.

The icon of a Scottish distilling family has opened a bourbon distillery near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Only days before his much-anticipated first release, he's found dead inside Lincoln's Birthplace National Historic Site. Because of the victim's notoriety, Doug and Jill Fletcher are asked to assist the local police with the investigation. The mystery becomes even more intriguing when a homeless man seems to know more about the victim and his business than the police.

Sage, at fourteen, grows up in turmoil in Nahant, Massachusetts—her changing body, her parents' rocky marriage. When her cousin Patrick visits for the summer, his parents' divorce has given him a reckless anger. He insists they explore the creepy mansion in the woods. Nate, Sage's younger brother, is reluctant to approach the manor where a beloved teacher was found hanged months earlier. The children's great-great-grandmother worked at Lakeluster House in a previous century and was under suspicion of shooting another servant.

In the shadows of British Columbia's Comox Valley, a tragic history refuses to rest. Based on chilling true events, Dancing Mary unearths the long-buried story of a young K’ómoks First Nation woman—named Mary by early settlers—who was betrayed and murdered by the very man she once trusted. Her spirit, said to appear as a shimmering blue orb, haunted the area for decades. The last vivid encounter occurred in 1914, when a soldier cycling down Comox Road rode through the ghostly light and described an otherworldly cold that he would never forget.

Nicknamed Hotspur for tirelessly thwarting threats to England, Sir Harry Percy should be riding easy. Deeply in love, he builds an idyllic life in Northumberland at Tower House with his sweetheart, Ciarry. Trouble brews, though, under Henry IV, who became king—over Harry's objections—by inciting a mob to make Parliament oust the venal Richard II and enthrone Henry. Now the new monarch rules as despotically as his predecessor. Moreover, the Exchequer lacks money owed Harry for national defense.