National Network for Equitable Library Service

Between his time with the Detroit Red Wings in the 1950s, the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s, and his days as a scout with the New Jersey Devils, Marcel Pronovost has earned eight Stanley Cup rings and enjoyed one of the longest NHL careers of all time. Encounters with game greats and a 32-page photo spread punctuate this compelling life story.

Our Woman will not be sunk by what life's about to serve her. She's caught her son doing unmentionable things out by the barn. She's been accosted by Red the Twit, who claims to have done things with Our Woman's husband that could frankly have gone without mentioning. And now her son's gone and joined the army, and Our Woman has found a young fella to do unmentionable things with herself, just so she might understand it all 'Malarky' is the story of an Irish mother forced to look grief in the eye, and of a wife come face-to-face with the mad agony of longing.

Clark Blaise's Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood, the fantasy-driven son of a too-charming, two-timing furniture salesman. David is cerebral, sensitive, sickly, and inexperienced'but when a shocking sexual awakening propels him into a world of murder and extortion, his adolescent illusions are stripped bare, and his relationship with his father changes forever.

Two runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drugstore bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshold in an attempt to save a life and a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she's caught in far more dangerous currents. An auto worker who loses his family in a car accident is forced to reconsider his relationship with the internal combustion engine. Alexander MacLeod is a writer of 'ferocious intelligence' and 'ferocious physicality' (CTV).

A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in a small town.

Ellie Lucan's about as far as she can get from the screwed-up teenager she used to be. She's got a doctorate, her husband's a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at the local Montessori. When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her two sons to spend the summer with in her hometown. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons.

'So,' she says. 'Who died tonight?' Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes.

Norman Levine was a permanent outsider, by temperament and by choice as Polish born immigrant, as resident alien, as writer, as Jew and he observed life from the margins with an unsentimental eye. Raised in Ottawa after immigrating, Levine served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World war. He then lived an itinerant life for a time before settling down in the community of St. Ives in England, becoming close friends with painters such as Francis Bacon and Patrick Heron.

Hitting the Charts brings back into print stories that go as far back as 1980, offering up the full range of Leon Rooke's voice and accomplishment. These are stories as improvisations, as performances, stories which push the boundaries of form and function, as free from constraint as a Monk solo and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. A new sort of literary riff, then, a dazzling display of language and sensibility, deserving of its own unique adjective: Rookian.

Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, in the late stages of Alzheimer's, has become inexplicably anti-Semitic. Alison, his young suburban protege, has never heard of the Holocaust. When Alison notices a tattoo on the arm of one of her older clients, and then one of her gay friends is brutally murdered by a group of skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey into a world of hate and confusion. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly declining Malcolm with her.