National Network for Equitable Library Service

For Sylvie, Ragged Island - and the whales who swam around it - is the only world she has ever known. It is the place where she was born and raised, where she lived with her four late husbands, and where she plans to live out her remaining years. It is also the home to a community whose love for the island is immense. But when the Nova Scotia government decides to shut down the ferry service that is the lifeblood of Ragged Island, the residents see their world beginning to disappear. Sea of Tranquility is the lyrical and moving story of an island struggling to survive.

Short-listed for the 2005 Snow Willow Award and for the 2006 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award Cole Fennety doesn’t know it, but he is about to have the strangest summer of his life. His little sister, Jessie, is driving him crazy, his mother is too wrapped up in the world of daytime soaps to intervene, and his best friend, Wayne, is out of control. Worst of all, his boss, Sam Kerrigan, is the meanest man in town. But beneath Sam’s crusty exterior lies a kind heart – as well as a terrible secret that forces Cole to face questions to which there are no easy answers.

A translator, fed up with translating paperback romances, undertakes the translation of the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer, Leonard Ming. She travels from Canada to Spain to do her work, encountering love and death in the seaside Andalusian town of Almunecar.

Winner of the 2005 Ann Connor Brimer Award, short-listed for the 2006 Hackmatack Award The year is 1893, the place is Chicago, and the most fabulous fair the Earth has ever seen becomes an unusual home for a young Labrador Inuit boy dubbed Pomiuk, Prince of the North, who captures the hearts of the millions of people who click through the turnstiles to see Eskimo Village, one of dozens of living cultures showcased at the exhibition. Just as he did so long ago, Pomiuk’s adventures will once again charm and enthrall all those who come his way.

Novelist and poet Claude Le Bouthillier draws on his Acadian and New Brunswick heritage to create Phantom Ships. First published in 1989 as Le Feu du Mauvais Temps, it gives an account of the end of the French Empire in Canada as experienced by the authors own ancestor, Joseph Le Bouthillier.

Short-listed for the 2003 Red Maple Award and Arthur Ellis Award for best Juvenile Book, commended for the 2003 Canadian Children’s Book Centre Our Choice Selection Shelby Belgarden isn’t exactly thrilled when people start thinking Greg is her boyfriend. After all, she’s more interested in the athletic Nick Jarvis. But one day Greg suddenly becomes more interesting to Shelby – though for all the wrong reasons: Shelby begins to suspect that Greg is responsible for the series of arsons that have occurred in her small New Brunswick town in recent weeks.

Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine’s Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson’s murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute’s patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the human psyche.

Cyril Dabydeen’s new collection of stories, North of the Equator, looks at the polarities of tropical and temperate places. Acclaimed novelist Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners) says, "Dabydeen is in the vanguard of contemporary short-story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada." Dabydeen’s characters occupy the spaces in between. They live in limbo, stretched between two worlds: one, an adopted home in Canada; the other, a birthplace in the islands scattered across the equator.

Melanie Gordonstone, a cherubic six-year-old, was Daddy’s favourite in every way. So Margaret, her jealous 12-year-old sister, drowned her in a backyard pool. Inexperience led young Detective Bliss to attribute the girl’s death to accident, but Melanie’s mother drives herself mad believing her husband to be the killer. Margaret taunts her deranged mother for 10 years before putting her out of her misery, hanging her from a chandelier in a faked suicide.

Young Robert Pachal crosses Canada by train with his brotherinlaw’s coffin, bearing witness to a way of life that will never be seen again. When he arrives in Barry’s Bay, he unwittingly sets in motion one of the final and most tragic events in pioneer Canada.