National Network for Equitable Library Service

Air is essential for life. The need for air is so important that breathing is instinctual. Yet Air is unstable and capricious, blowing gently as a summer breeze in one moment and blasting with the fury of a tornado in the next. No wonder that tricksters, fairies, and spirits belong to Air just as much as winged creatures. Elusive and ethereal, Air’s denizens are difficult to find and harder to capture.

Writing at the top of her game, Sharon Butala returns to the short story in this astounding new collection. In Butala’s world, the season of fury and wonder is the season of old age. The stories in this book are the stories of women who have had experiences; women who have seen much of life and have felt joy of success and the sting of shortcomings; women who hold opinions and come to conclusions about the lives they’ve lived.

Devin died five years ago. She got an infection, lost her arm, and died. How can Devin be in a picture posted online today?

Fourteen stories that illuminate the strange workings of the human heart.

Reclaiming Tom Longboat recounts the history of Indigenous sport in Canada through the lens of the prestigious Tom Longboat Awards, shedding light on a significant yet overlooked aspect of Canadian policy and Crown-Indigenous relations.

Adam's Tree is a fictional account of life on the Cowesses First Nation in Saskatchewan during the 1940's and 50's.This period in history finds forces like regulatory policy, World War II, systemic racism, and the long reach of the depression defining reserve life and rural relationships. These short stories are told from the perspective of various characters on the reserve: an Indigenous teenage girl named Sophie, men who return to Cowesses after the war, struggling with untreated and unacknowledged PTSD, settlers like the local school teacher and the "Indian agent".

Refusing to accept being dismissed by a society that leaves little space for old women, three friends plan a daring and extraordinary adventure Hannelore, Clotilde, and Frau Schnadelhuber are tired of living in a world that does not allow old women to be seen or heard. Determined to prove their worth to a society devoted to youth, the three women set out to undertake a dangerous stunt that's not to be ignored.

Winner of the 2013 Alberta Readers' Choice Award Rebee Shore's life is fragmented. She's forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth. The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother's fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators'family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself'her family's dark past, and the core of her mother's despair, are slowly revealed.

In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation.

Disappearing Moon Cafe was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the reader from the wilderness in nineteenth-century British Columbia to late twentieth-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver's Chinatown.