National Network for Equitable Library Service

Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting- until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.

Raised in a polygamous community, Jon starts to question the rules of his faith. After he is caught kissing a girl, he is forced to flee his town and the only life he knows. He finds a community of other Lost Boys, or "polygs," but is utterly unprepared for life outside his community of Unity. He spirals into a life of numbing booze, drugs and homelessness. When he hits rock bottom, someone from his past enters his new life and helps him find his way. Jon and several of the novel's other characters were introduced in Shelley Hrdlitschka's earlier novel Sister Wife.

Sixteen-year-old Jolene, named after the girl in the Dolly Parton song, is from a long line of lowlifes, but at least they're musical lowlifes. Her mother is a tanning-salon manager who believes she can channel her karaoke habit into a professional singing career. Jolene's dad, a failed bass player, has gone back to the family demolition business and lives by the company motto: "We do not build things; we only tear them down." But Jolene and her big brother, Matt, are true musicians, writing songs together that make everything Jo hates about their lives matter less.

This was the line between here and there. No landwash, no vague intertidal zone, no undecided. She stood at the edge, a mass of instincts and yearnings and despair, while the dawn painted itself in around her, shade by delicate shade. The kids call her Lighthouse: no lights on up there. In a small town, everyone knows when you can't read. But Cathy is just distracted by the light and lines and artistry of everyday life. She is a talented artist growing up in tiny Mariners Cove and yearns for acceptance. She dreams of enrolling in art school, but getting there will be a struggle.

Rebellion is Portuguese literary celebrity Cristina Carvalho's international debut. Born a rebel, Lena escapes her provincial existence and heads for Lisbon as a young woman to make a more exciting life for herself. Once there, though, she makes a series of fateful decisions--spending a night in a brothel, embarking on a marriage she lives to regret, longing instead for the blue-eyed man of her dreams.

Meet Frederick Madrigal: the seventh son of a struggling woman on welfare who already had three sets of male twins spaced two years apart. A one-time child prodigy, Frederick was the subject of the benevolent index finger of God. While his older brothers ran wild, the sensitive and musically gifted Frederick began to sneak out of the house to sing for spare change in front of city bars and nightclubs, his repertoire learned from his mother's secret midnight singing.

Sixteen-year-old Tamera lives in La Cresta, a rural fishing community on a Caribbean island. Despite having the support of relatives, including her dad, Earl, her elder sister, Mary and her best friend and first cousin, Jan, she struggles to deal with her mom's mental health issues and the absence of her boyfriend, Dalton who moves out of the village to work. Tamera's life is further complicated after one of her classmates disappears, and weeks turn to months without any word of the missing girl's whereabouts. Life gets even more challenging after Tamera suffers a personal loss.

The Shining Fragments is a family saga about the Irish in Canada that explores the ramifications of abandonment, obsession, love, memory, and visionary power. Spanning the years 1882-1904, it follows Joseph Conlon from his early childhood in Ulster to his experiences of youth and adulthood as an immigrant. Left behind as a small boy on a Toronto train-station platform like so much forgotten luggage, Joseph grows up in a city bleak with bigotry. He discovers that he has artistic talent and becomes a designer of stained-glass windows.

It's just another boring summer for our teenaged narrator -- until Barbra arrives. An Ethiopian Jew, Barbra was brought to Israel at age five, a part of Operation Solomon, and now our narrator's well-intentioned father has brought her, as a teen, to their home for the summer. But Barbra isn't the docile and grateful orphan they expect, and soon our narrator, terrified of her and drawn to her in equal measure, finds himself immersed in compulsive psychosexual games with her, as she binge-drinks and lies to his family. Things go terribly wrong, and Barbra flees.

We All Need to Eat, is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.