National Network for Equitable Library Service

Having lost her husband through divorce, and her daughter who has left home to go to university, Claire, at midlife, finds herself bereft; she is aging and she feels she has never really been sufficiently engaged in her own life. A perhaps largely-unconscious part of her has wisely chosen to put herself out of her comfort zone by accepting a teaching position in San Jose, Mexico, where she falls in love with Lolo, a Mexican man she both loves and fears, not only because he is an outrageously powerful life force but also a darkly threatening force that she feels could spell danger.

Rimana Sen, a young Indian woman, is thrilled to be recruited by a company in Canada and pleased to escape her mother’s expectations of marriage. On the flight to Canada she meets Jug Ducati, a young Canadian. By the time their flight arrives in Toronto, they are well on their way to falling in love. At the airport, Rimana is whisked away by a couple of shady men, so when Jug does not hear from her, he enlists the support of his two best friends, and begins to search for her.

Amity provides a window to the wreckage caused by war and conflict that leave behind destruction, displacement, pain and struggle resulting in life-long and irreparable psychological disorders. It is a story about the lives of various people who are dealing with the devastation of war and conflict, here specifically within the contexts of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and Iran’s revolution.

God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason.

Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in Ile d’Or, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late twentieth century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today.

Stony Point tells the story of a woman who succeeds in doing things at a time when custom restricts her from doing anything. In 1903, shortly after the Frank slide, a newspaper reporter vanishes from a mining town in the Crowsnest Pass. Lucille travels to Stony Point in search of her sister's husband. She finds a town under the heel of a ruthless mine owner who has the local Mounted Policeman and a corrupt businessman in his pocket. Determined to find Stanley Birch, Lucille turns Stony Point upside-down.

Based on a true story, Tell Anna She’s Safe is the tale of two women, one missing, the other searching for her. Driving home alongside West Quebec’s Gatineau River one April afternoon, researcher Ellen McGinn spots a parked car that looks like it might belong to her friend and colleague, Lucy Stockman. She soon finds out that Lucy has disappeared. Ellen has an unusual dream in which she receives three clear messages: she is to search and to write everything down—and Lucy is safe. But is she?

A gritty tragi-comic fairy tale of sexual obsession and longing, based in equal parts on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, Once Upon A Time In West Toronto is the story of outsiders reinventing themselves in Toronto’s immigrant neighbourhoods from the 1970s to the present. It follows the adventures of Ida, an Italian proxy bride who came to Canada married a man she’d never met, only to run off with his son; her lover, the brilliant ditch digger, Marcello; Bum Bum, a virtuous thief; and various hustlers, forgers and whores.

Holy Rule takes place during three weeks in October, 1958, focusing on the lives of a group of nuns who teach at St. Monica’s Girls’ School. During this time of high autumn, the pope lies dying in Rome — and then finally dies — while thousands of miles away life carries on among the students and teaching nuns in St. Monica’s Girls’ School. The girls—Gwen, J.J., Sally — are living in the adolescent space between childhood and adulthood and are testing their limits with their nun-teachers.

Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency.