National Network for Equitable Library Service

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book. October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen — here is the story behind history . . . Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of one of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly discovered.

Maud Lewis is a folk art legend who persevered through stigma, poverty, and disability to create beautiful and lasting pieces of art. Brighten the Corner Where You Are brings illumination to Maud's life.

Partially inspired by the real-life experiences of a former resident of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, The Lost Sister bravely explores the topics of child abuse, neglect, and abduction against a complex interplay of gender, race, and class dynamics. Alisha and Diana are young sisters living at Jane and Finch, a Toronto suburb full of immigrants trying to build new lives in North America. Diana, the eldest, is the light of the little family, the one Alisha longs to emulate more than anyone else.

Antoinette and Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel set out with a determination to prove themselves. Their journey propels them out of poverty and into extravagance. But when World War I breaks out, their lives are irrevocably changed, and the sisters must gather the courage to fashion their own places in the world, even if apart from each other.

Clare McHugh tells the story of Victoria, the Princess Royal, from her younger years as the apple of her father Albert's eyes through her rise to power atop the mighty German empire to her final months of life.

Lucia Joyce, daughter of Irish novelist James Joyce, is a gifted and motivated dancer, training tirelessly with some of the finest teachers in the world. Though her father delights in his daughter's talent, she clashes with her mother, Nora. When a romantic relationship with Samuel Beckett sours, Lucia's dreams unravel, as does her hope of a life beyond her father's shadow, and her father sends her to pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Here, she tells her own story--an account of thwarted ambition, passionate creativity, and the power of love to both inspire and destroy.

Swept into a passionate affair with the idolized mercenary, Anita's life is suddenly consumed by the plight to liberate Southern Brazil from Portugal, a struggle that would cost thousands of lives and span almost ten bloody years. Little did she know that this first taste of revolution would lead her to cross oceans, traverse continents, and alter the course of her entire life, and the world.

A young widow and candlemaker, Varina Westcott, agrees to travel to Wales to investigate the suspicious death of the newly married Prince Arthur as a secret request of Queen Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII. But with each clue, fears arise that the conspiracy Varina is confronting is far more ambitious and treacherous than even the queen imagined. And it aims to utterly destroy the Tudor dynasty.

Born into a first family of Ireland, with royal ties on both sides, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, known as Gera, finds her world overturned when Henry VIII imprisons her father, the Earl of Kildare, and brutally destroys her family. Torn from the home she loves, her remaining family scattered, Gera dares not deny the refuge offered her in England's glittering royal court. There she must navigate ever-shifting alliances even as she nurtures her secret desire for revenge.

Joan plots to scandalize Edward, Prince of Wales, and the royal family, for she has learned they engineered her father's downfall and death. But what begins as a calculated strategy soon grows into love. When Joan learns that Edward returns her feelings, she is soon fighting her own, for how can she love the man that ruined her family? And, if she does, what will be the cost?