National Network for Equitable Library Service

Songwriter Michel Laflamme is stuck in traffic on Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge. While waiting for police to try to talk down a potential suicide, Michel turns on the radio and hears his wife, Bijou, founding member of Beaupré, the seminal Quebec folk-rock group. The music takes Michel across a 30-year span of memory, through the emotional and political upheavals of his own life and that of his Belle Province.

Franck Robinson, forty-something, chaser of skirts, usually the low-end sidewalk variety, combs the streets of Paris in search of Sheba, whom he imagines to be the ultimate Parisian whore. Franck drifts from bordello to bar, and ultimately finds himself trapped by his own demons of alcohol and a fatal attraction. With this hilarious novel, the Canadian MacKinnon showcases a talent for the absurd and a mastery of language reminiscent of Henry Miller.

A Tristram Shandy–esque novella about failing memory and failed writing, from one of French Canada’s most exciting new voices. A young, floundering author meets Robert ‘Baloney’ Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of several evenings, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec’s Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poised to disappear without a trace. But as the blocked writer discovers, Lacerte might just be full of it.

A CBC Canada Reads 2015 Selection! Finalist for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation Deep in a Northern Ontario forest live Tom and Charlie, two octogenarians determined to live out the rest of their lives on their own terms: free of all ties and responsibilities, their only connection to civilization two pot farmers who bring them whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But their solitude is disrupted by the arrival of two women.

In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge.

Shortlisted for a 2009 Lambda Award When Auden learns he’s HIV-positive, he decides to head for Toronto, leaving behind Sudbury and his old personality. Determined to construct a whole new Auden, he gets a new job, new clothes, new habits, new friends, new ways of speaking. And all of these things seem to be leading him inevitably towards Steve, Steve Reinke.

Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that it’s winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter. They don’t talk much with the other ten-year-olds — most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but she’s busy breaking kids’ faces with her math book. Besides, the Russians from the meat-packing plant are a lot cooler, and they always win at curling.

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is not content simply to read and discuss books. Their process is a little more involved. They once kidnapped Irving Layton and took him for an excursion up a mountain. They attempted to recreate a scene of a nun swinging from a bridge-builder's broken arm in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. But when they begin to re-enact the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the early days of the Iraq War, the book begins to enact them instead, sending the Cabalists across the globe and driving the narrators out of their own tale.

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest. Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet.

Nominated for a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean region), a Toronto Book Award and a Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award. March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are ‘in the tip,’ finding easy pickings among the jostling masses. Eli Morenz, city man for the Daily Star, is covering the festivities and uncovering the pickpocket racket working the scene.