National Network for Equitable Library Service

Written from the points of view of four young people living in Johannesburg and Soweto in 1976, one white, one South Asian, one a Black student and one a Black gangster, this book explores the roots of the Soweto Riots and the relationships between the races in a South Africa about to explode.

Can you really move forward without putting the past to rest? Grace Willingdon has everything she needs. For fifteen years she?s lived in a trailer overlooking Bras d?Or Lakes in postcard-perfect Baddeck, Cape Breton, with Fletcher Parsons, a giant teddy bear who?s not even her husband. But Grace?s blissful life is rudely interrupted when her estranged son calls from New York City, worried about his teenaged daughter. Before she knows it, Grace finds herself the temporary guardian of her self-absorbed, city-slicker granddaughter, Melissa.

Coping with the recent death of his father, twelve-year-old Jacob Mosher is sent to spend the summer with his aging, estranged (and strange!) grandparents in rural Newport Landing, Nova Scotia. Reluctantly, he trades the security of his foster mum in ?Upper Canada? for a blind grandfather, Frank, who dresses like a sea captain and conducts flag-raising ceremonies, and a quirky grandmother, Pearl, who sometimes forgets her dentures and has Jacob running in circles.

When thirteen-year-old Jamie Francis's parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Halifax to the small town of River Bend, Nova Scotia. Jamie doesn't have any friends and isn't sure how she'll ever make any, when she comes across a neglected-looking horse in a field: a golden palomino she names Peach. After befriending Peach's widowed owner, Jamie learns that her newfound friend is being sold to notorious horse-trainer, Valerie Scott, at nearby Tamarack Stables.

When seventeen-year-old track and field star Jesse Collins's dreams of a full scholarship are shattered after the sudden death of her dad, she leaves home to work as a summer camp counsellor to escape the nosy stares in small town-- and her own secret guilt. After a mix-up at registration, she's put in charge of a boys' cabin, and the head counsellor, Kirk, predicts she won't last the first two weeks.

After a thirty-year exile in Toronto, self-described ?mid-listing? Newfoundland author James Nightingale leaves behind a failed marriage to a successful classical musician, who has taken up with an avant-garde composer, and a middling, if critically successful, career to return temporarily to St. John?s to receive an honourary degree from his alma mater.

Linda Moore?s long-awaited sequel to Foul Deeds is another highly engaging mix of art and environmental justice. Finally working a real job as a researcher for the Public Prosecution Service, Roz is on her first paid vacation. She has rented a cottage on Nova Scotia?s beautiful Minas Basin with plans to explore ideas for her next theatre production. Accompanied by her cat and a stack of Beckett plays, she has no sooner settled in than she spots what looks like a woman's body tangled in the roots of a floating tree.

The body of Pastor Sandy Gardner, a TV preacher with a global following, turns up near a Halifax container pier. The mysterious case lands with Cam Neville, a city cop with a dead wife, PTSD, and a haunting past. Can Neville, a former biker and war hero, solve the killing and find himself? In search of the truth, Neville and his partner, a Mi?kmaw Mountie named Blair Christmas, enter a perilous world of strippers, kiddie porn, and corruption that threatens to destroy them.

When heavy November rains threaten to flood the small town of Black River, New Brunswick, the community calls on the hydroelectric company to open the gates of its dam and drop the water level. But local management has been overruled by their parent company and ordered to keep it closed. It's got some people hinting it's time they took things into their own hands. Seventeen-year-old Stanton Frame is caught in between: his father is manager at the dam, but his girlfriend, Jessica, has joined an environmental group that's taken an interest in the matter.

KaLeah has just moved from Halifax to the small town of Trail, B.C. KaLeah's a natural at baseball, and it's what she loves to do most. But she is excluded and bullied by Nikki and her clique, the popular Valley Girls, because she is black and because she is better at softball than Nikki. She decides she wants to play baseball with the Trail Boys, the best players her age. Except it's an all-boys baseball team. But first KaLeah has to prove herself to the boys and the parents who don't want her to upstage their kids.