National Network for Equitable Library Service

Nominated for a 2005 Governor General's Award Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how she’s still a virgin and how she’ll never figure it all out.

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Winner of the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for Best Fiction. A Globe and Mail Best Novel of 2011. A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend's girlfriend is relieved.

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012) Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013) Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman with a strange power over him.

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceaușescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us.

This is the story of Isobel and Emile. They wake up beside each other one morning, and they slowly get out of bed. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They do not want it to be the last time but they know that it is. They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not. She stands on the platform and she watches him go. He is going to the city, where he will be an artist. He will make puppets, and films of puppets, that struggle to say something he does not have the words for.

On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes. But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle - Vancouver, Montreal, the island - that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family.

From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted ... Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there's a ghost in the old mill they're stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown. It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality -- if anything, that is.

The 2012 One Book Toronto title. Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls. Alex was witness to this first episode.

All sorts of things can happen, no matter what road you take, and I never forget that. Death in particular can never be forgotten. Since Rudi’s death, I have tried to anticipate and dodge obstacles like an Olympic skier. My agile imagination glides between the little red flags with ease. Philippe’s imagination is both infinite and inflexible. It’s a dangerous combination. He stays planted on the ground while looking down over reality. Between us, we do a good job of filling the realm of the possible.

Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer. WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLÉGIENS Simón turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together. Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometimes America, less often Peru – so many settings, all of which turned into the bedroom, eventually. It's 1862, and Spain is a little rueful about letting Peru have their independence.