National Network for Equitable Library Service

Set in East Africa, the Middle East, Canada, and the U.S., Things Are Good Now examines the weight of the migrant experience on the human psyche. In these pages, women, men, and children who've crossed continents in search of a better life find themselves struggling with the chaos of displacement and the religious and cultural clashes they face in their new homes. A maid who travelled to the Middle East lured by the prospect of a well-paying job is trapped in the Syrian war.

Detective Superintendent MacNeice is returning from a pilgrimage to his wife's grave when he's called to a crime scene of singular and disturbing beauty. A young woman in evening dress lies gracefully posed on the floor of a pristine summer cottage so that the finger of one hand regularly interrupts the needle arm of a phonograph playing Schubert's Piano Trio. The only visible mark on her is the bruise under her chin, which MacNeice recognizes: it is the mark that distinguishes dedicated violinists, the same mark that once graced his wife.

Finalist, Scotiabank Giller Prize. Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there's the Price's aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts.

On a cold morning in early spring, the body of a young woman is found trapped in the ice of Dundurn Bay. The next day at dawn, a homeless man discovers an unconscious school teacher in a public park. Gagged and bound with duct tape, the man is rigged to an elaborate bomb that's been set to blow if anyone attempts to free him.

Two bodies have been found in the master bedroom of a mansion in Dundurn's old-money neighbourhood under the mountain. Howard Terry and his son Matthew have both been shot twice in the chest. Under Matthew's body is a doll with blood red cotton wadding spilling out of its head. Nearby, a female mannequin in a nightshirt lies on its back with two bullet holes in the chest. On the other side of town, a body is discovered below the Devil's Punch Bowl waterfall. Leaning against an enormous rock is a man in a cotton nightshirt wearing a papier mâché donkey's head. Two rounds in the chest.

Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out. The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline.

In settings that range from the old American West to pre-revolutionary France, from a present-day dig site in the high tablelands of South America to deep space, That Tiny Life is a wide-ranging and utterly original collection of short fiction and a novella that examines the idea of progress - humanity's never-ending cycle of creation and destruction. In the award-winning story, "Valley Floor," a surgeon performs an amputation in the open desert in the American West.

Nominated, Scotiabank Giller Prize. Internationally celebrated as one of literature's most gifted stylists, Lisa Moore returns with her third story collection, a soaring chorus of voices, dreams, loves, and lives. Taking us from the Fjord of Eternity to the streets of St. John's and the swamps of Orlando, these stories show us the timeless, the tragic, and the miraculous hidden in the underbelly of our everyday lives. A missing rock god may have jumped a cruise ship - in the Arctic. A grieving young woman may live next to a serial rapist.

As a local biker war rages - seven shrink-wrapped corpses have been found buried on a farm just outside of Dundurn - an ambitious waterfront project meant to revive the dying industrial city is underway. Dredging is nearly complete when six more bodies turn up at the bottom of the lake. With the body count rising, the situation in Dundurn escalates as a serial killer begins targeting the city's successful young women of colour.

The fourth book in what the Globe and Mail has proclaimed "a terrific series" by "a writer to watch." Summer descends over the picturesque King's Cove as Darling and Lane's mutual affection blossoms. But their respite from solving crime is cut short when a British government official arrives in Nelson to compel Darling to return to England for questioning about the death of a rear gunner under his command in 1943. In Darling's absence, Ames oversees the investigation into the suspicious death of a local elderly woman and uncovers a painful betrayal inflicted forty years earlier.