National Network for Equitable Library Service

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back. A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in 'search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author.' Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life.

A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it's the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family's cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plotting to save Yogi, the bullied, buttertart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road.

Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water. As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid America slides into fascism, kids from south of the border collide with kids from north of the border and, over lattes, ruminate on new possibilities.

Nominated for a Governor General's Award for Translation. Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a storm without feeling threatened. Waiting. After a few moments I become, I am, the storm, the disruption, the precipitation, the agitation that puts reality in peril. Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel.

Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: ‘gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole.’ Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs into the family car and vanishes, Eugenia doubles in age overnight, but remains the dark and diminutive creature who earned the nickname ‘Stunt.’ Eugenia devotes herself to finding Sheb. She writes to the man she believes to be Sheb’s father: I.I.

Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press. Out of the pages of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and into a blustery Montreal weekend steps a modern-day Nora Flood, plundering vivid memories across three Canadian cities - Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal - to uncover the roots of a sexual obsession that has her trapped in its sterile heart.

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates. When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs and raunchy humour - and a fierce loyalty to one another and to their sport. But in their raucous midst, Iz can't quite find her own place in the game.

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide. His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David's deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S.

Her hands lay inert and upturned on her lap – probably stunned, she thinks, by the hideousness of the skirt underneath them. Centre seam puckered, zipper mangled, it's handmade in a way that makes people say, 'Did you sew that yourself?' when they mean, 'How can you wear that thing?' But she made it the day after he died, and she talked to him in her head the whole time. Which is why it looks like hell and why she had to wear it anyway. Biology is not Dree's thing. Equally heinous are English, Social Studies, her sister and mother, not to mention Edmonton in general.