National Network for Equitable Library Service

After her father disappears on Crystal Night, fifteen-year-old Freda, her mother and Freda's younger sister flee Germany for the -safe haven- of Shanghai. But the safe haven becomes anything but safe when Freda's mother abandons her children. Forced to become an adult before her time, Freda finds strength, work and new friends. She also joins the Junior Jewish Resistance, a small group of young people determined to show their defiance toward Japanese and Nazi soldiers, who are too close for comfort in their new home.

At a side-of-the-highway diner on a mountain pass, during one extraordinary, windy day in 1977, the paths of an odd assortment of travellers cross. The stories of each circle around points of departure: what sets one on one's journey. These seemingly unconnected-but oddly interconnected-stories involve strange twists, turns and the kinds of chance encounters that change the way we see the world.

The latest installment in Dave Hugelschaffer's innovative murder-mystery series sends forest fire forensics expert Porter Cassel to the isolated northern Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan, where an arsonist armed with Molotov cocktails has started a series of blazes. During his investigation the remains of a trapper are discovered in a burned-down cabin. The RCMP rule the death accidental, but Cassel isn't so sure. Complicating matters are unfriendly locals who don't take kindly to outsiders prying into their business.

Caught in a net of her own lies

"The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan''s long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary "Mouse" Bradford. Mouse''s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father -- the admired country doctor -- is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.

Bujumbura, Burundi is one of the last places you would expect to find Thomas Brossard. Once a powerful cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government, Thomas never had a particular interest in the continent of Africa and the concerns it represented. That was his wife Louise’s domain. But, after an embarrassing election loss, Thomas will do just about anything to regain political power and improve his wife’s estimation of him.

The Vanishing Man is a collection of linked short stories about a man trying to come to terms with his past, a religious upbringing, in an ever-changing personal world that constantly throws him into self-doubt. He marries, finds happiness, only to go through a terrible divorce. He recovers, finds true love, marries, and goes through another terrible divorce and family death. He goes into therapy and tries to make sense of his failures and unhappiness by attempting to reclaim his past life. But this only partly succeeds.

"Valentine Schwartz had it all: his girlfriend was the most beautiful girl in school, he came from a rich family, and his best friend, Huddie Rosen, all but worshiped him. Although Valentine wasn't the brightest student, no one could have forseen him falling off the roof of his north Toronto high school in a suit of medieval armour, and dying at the tender age of seventeen. Twenty-five years later Huddie Rosen, now living in Prague, has more important questions on his mind. Can he save his marriage and family?

Urgle is not a good hunter; he's not good at much of anything, particularly being a big brother to Cubby. But he has no family to fall back on: Urgle and Cubby live among the Brothers of the Ikkuma Pit. One by one, generations of boys have been abandoned as babies by their mothers to fend for themselves in the Pit. They spend their lives struggling to survive in an all-boys village. They don't know what lies outside the Pit, because no one has ever ventured out and returned to tell about it. Until now.

A robber holds up a Canadian bank but instead of stealing money he takes from each person the item of most sentimental value. As time passes the loss of these items have a dramatic effect on the victims: one discovers God under her sofa, another is attacked by her lion tattoo when it comes to life, & the wife of our narrator starts to shrink.