National Network for Equitable Library Service

What do you do when you’re being watched at every turn by creatures plotting to take over the world? Simon Carpenter is a normal 16-year-old living in Vancouver. Or is he normal? Any type of music drives him crazy. When walking by a homeless person, he can see the world through the drunken man’s eyes. And when visiting a pet shop he hears a rabbit speaking to him. To solve these mysteries, he takes the rabbit home, only to discover that a foreign "presence" lives inside it.

Angus and his family are sent from Scotland in 1813 on a voyage to start a new life in the strange and cruel new land of western Canada. In 1813, cleared out from their beloved Scottish Highlands, 15-year-old Angus, his mother, father, small brother Rabbie, and 100 others sail for Canada to seek a better life with assistance from Lord Selkirk. Angus, his family, and their friends the O’Hares, with their aloof, unsmiling daughter Maggie, share the hardships and terror of the sea voyage only to be dumped onto the shore of a forbidding land.

After being outcast to a small community, 10-year-old Michiko’s life gets better when a former baseball star becomes her teacher. Second book in the Cherry Blossom Books series. Ten-year-old Michiko wants to be proud of her Japanese heritage but can’t be. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her family’s possessions are confiscated and they are forced into deprivation in a small, insular community. The men are sent to work on the railway, so the women and children are left to make the trip on their own.After a former Asahi baseball star becomes her new teacher, life gets better.

Murders and disappearances in one building … but are they connected? Hollis Grant has fashioned a new life for herself with a foster child and a job as resident super of an eight-storey apartment building with a split personality. Hollis finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation when a tenant, a woman working for an escort agency, is murdered. The detective in charge is Rhona Simpson, with whom Hollis has crossed swords in the past.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of "peace, love, rock and roll," and the Vietnam War. It’s the summer of 1971, and fifteen-year-old Darlene travels with her mother to cottage country. This year her wild cousin, Elizabeth, is staying with them in the hopes that time away from Toronto will straighten her out – but Elizabeth has other plans. It’s her summer mission to torment Darlene by manipulating her friends and seducing every eligible male in her path.

When renowned opera singer Marta Hendriks sees her dead husband in a Paris street, she fears she’s losing her mind — or did she actually see him? Marta Hendriks is onstage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York when she learns of her beloved husband’s death in a house fire. Overcome, she collapses and has to be carried off the stage. Fast-forward two years and countless therapy sessions, and Marta is ready to resume her career. In a stroke of luck, she’s hired at the last moment to sing Violetta for the Paris Opera.

When Fiona MacGillivray refuses the bandit Paul Sheridan, it’s up to her son to to save her. Book Three of the Klondike Mystery Series by Vicki Delany! In the summer of 1897, Fiona MacGillivray and her eleven year-old son, Angus, arrive in Vancouver in time to hear the news gold discovered in the Klondike! Fiona immediately sets off for Skagway, Alaska, intent on opening a theatre. After one encounter with infamous gangster Soapy Smith and his henchman Paul Sheridan, she decides to pursue her ambitions on the other side of the border in Dawson City.

Is it a happy ending? Define happy. Stuart Lewis, thirty-three, in love and content, wakes up one day to find his fiance has left him. Perpetually underemployed and now homeless, Stuart moves onto his mother’s couch. With few connections and no ambition, Stuart is forced to rethink the choices he has made and the sincerity of the life that has just been shattered. Set against the frigid backdrop of downtown Toronto, The Year She Left casts an eclectic bunch of directionless underachievers and unlikely heroes amid the buzz of late night binges and early corporate bustle.

First published in 1935, Young Renny takes us even further back in the Whiteoak family saga to 1906. Renny, the young master of Jalna, is just eighteen. His twenty-year-old sister Meg is engaged to marry the young man next door, Maurice Vaughan Uncle Nick and Uncle Ernest, now in their fifties, have squandered their inheritances abroad on high living and reside again at Jalna. But the plot thickens further, when two outsiders join the mix: A gypsy woman, who seduces Renny, and a distant cousin from Ireland, who befriends Gran, moves into Jalna, and spies on the family.

Arthur James Marshall Smith — prize-winning poet, essayist, influential anthologist, and critic — died in 1980. His last book, The Classic Shade: Selected Poems, on which Selected Writings is based, stands as his final intention in the world of literature.To this long out of print book the editor has added original material by Smith in which he defined and advanced modernism in Canadian writing. This edition also includes annotation, an extended introduction, and a bibliography.