National Network for Equitable Library Service

Nominated for the BMO Winterset Award and the ReLit Award From award-winning author Edward Riche comes an immensely readable and sharp novel about "C"-list screenwriter and wannabe vintner Elliot Johnson. With his life growing more ruinous by the day -- his writing career is on the rocks, his struggling vineyard is being investigated by the feds, and his son, a former child star, is in prison -- Elliot decides to do what any self-respecting wine lover would do: escape to France. Alas, fate has other things in store.

This is the story of Edouard, Stephane, and the spirited girl they find alone and apparently lost in Paris. When the two men offer the young Quebec girl shelter for the night, their lives are profoundly and irrevocably changed. Stephane falls quickly for Delphine, but Edouard, a man without expectations who hides from the world in a life of mediocrity and whose only desire is to live and die quietly, is slower to accept her. He is disturbed by Delphine's abrupt arrival in his life, her strange accent, her excessive passion.

Full of the mordant wit and unflinching observations we've come to admire in Bissonette's earlier, award-winning novels and stories, An Appropriate Place is as much a commentary on the triumphs and self-deception of the political generation that refashioned Quebec as it is a dramatic story of one woman looking for her place within a disappointing world.

A lost feminist classic — and winner of the Toronto Book Award — reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication.In her yearning, elusive search for a lover, Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab “basic black” existence together with torturous memories of guilt and loss as a Jewish immigrant in Toronto.Shirley Kaszenbowski, née Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls.

In Degrees of Nakedness, Lisa Moore's first story collection, the joys and distresses of love course through modern-day Newfoundland like an electric current. Lisa Moore's stories are bright, emotionally engaging, tangible. She marks out the precious moments of her characters' lives against deceptively commonplace backdrops -- a St. John's hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines; a half-built house "like a rib cage around a lungful of sky" -- and the results linger long in the memory.

No writer in Canada today is more in love with the English, and French, languages than John Lavery. That love is gloriously requited. In inventive, incantatory prose, Sandra Beck, his long-awaited first novel, paints a very unusual portrait of a lady. This is a book about many things: the struggling antics of adolescence, the banal delusions of solitude, the city of Montreal. But it is, above all, a deeply moving tribute to a woman who is both present and absent on every page. Who is Sandra Beck?

In nineteenth-century Quebec a woman plots the murder of her husband after the death of their child. After brewing a poison, she is arrested, denounced as a witch, and in a devastating conclusion, released from her terrifying obsessions.

Joe Dick, Billy Tallent, John Oxenburger, and Pipefitter are Hard Core Logo — Vancouver’s legendary, but now defunct, punk band.Joe Dick coaxes his former bandmates to overcome personal differences and reunite for a benefit concert for their ageing punk mentor, Bucky Haight, who has been shot. But the concert’s not enough for Joe; he wants the band to hit the road again.

Lisa Moore's Open makes you believe three things unequivocally: that St. John's is the centre of the universe, that these stories are about absolutely everything, that the only certainty in life comes from the accumulation of moments which refuse to be contained. Love, mistakes, loss -- the fear of all of these, the joy of all of these.

In Augustino and the Choir of Destrucion literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals.