National Network for Equitable Library Service

From the author of The Winter Palace comes Eve Stachniak’s first novel about the discovery of secrets and lies that stitch together empires and individual lives. Winner of the 2000 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Prize Necessary Lies tells the story of the discovery of secrets and lies that stitch together empires and individual lives. What are the lies we tell ourselves and others that get us through our lives? In the summer of 1981 Anna is suddenly offered the opportunity to study English at McGill University in Montreal.

Artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors come to the Banff Centre for the Arts to work on their craft in the peaceful mountain setting. But when Alan Montrose is found dead, that peacefulness is shattered. Some even go so far as to suspect foul play was involved with the playwright's death, though most accept the fatality as merely an accident. Then, a second death occurs. Erika Dekter burns to death inside the boat studio. And this time, it is clear that it was no accident. Are the two deaths connected? If so, who wanted these two artists killed?

Hakeem Jinnah enjoys an ordinary life of working the Vancouver Tribune's crime beat, flirting with women, seeking interested investors in a mail-order-bride scheme, and driving around in his sattelite-guided Love Machine. But when he and another Tribune reporter begin competing to cover the story of a shady stock promoter's death, he finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation. This entertaining and suspenseful debut introduces us to an unforgettable lead character. Mr.

All the ingredients for a superb thriller are present in John Bishop Ballem’s tenth novel. On Manchineel, the Caribbean playground of the rich and famous, Skye MacLeod flies his own vintage airplane, attends parties, flirts with a gin-loving princess, and falls in love with the ex-wife of a powerful American senator. He comes to realize that there is something dreadfully wrong with this island paradise through a series of strange events: unusual shark attacks, voodoo ceremonies, and the disappearance of several children and young adults.

It is 1942, and 12-year-old Laura Campbell arrives in Toronto, a city bustling with the war effort and news from abroad. While looking for something to do in the grandfather’s quite neighbourhood, she meets the reclusive woman living across the street. Laura is stunned to realize she is in the presence of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the very same writer who penned her favourite novels.

It’s no secret that Sylvia is a little crazy. People have thought so ever since she first came to town when she was a teenager. But outside her own family, no one knows the depth of her mental illness. For her daughter, Mercy, Sylvia’s illness is at once a source of agony and fascination.Mercy’s mother is absent from her life on several occasions. First, she is taken away to a mental hospital for treatment. Later, on a summer night in the early 1980s, Sylvia disappears entirely, never to be seen again.

Whether we are eavesdropping on the imaginative Saturdays of a Portuguese cleaning lady or living through a divorced woman’s search for the elusive orgasm. Norma Harrs manages in this collection of short stories to absorb the essence of her narrator’s psyche with the clarity of a good actress who gets under the very skin of her characters. Love, either the absence of or yearning for, is the theme that links that stories in this collection together.

Christian Petersen beautifully reins in the confusion and displacement of a diminishing band of men facing the daily spectre of an unforgiving land, men enslaved to the grind of the sawmill, hunkered on bar stools, high in the saddle of a John Deere, or wild behind the wheel speeding down dirt roads to the Fraser. Here are fathers, brothers, lovers in search of forsaken children, bygone loves, and memories long faded in the wash of fast-running streams and firelight.

Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Translation Larry Volt is one of the rare Quebec novels that deals with the FLQ crisis. Pierre Tourangeau captures a generation of young people who are rebelling, but above all, searching.

Runner-up for the 2004 ReLit Award High fashion, higher stakes, sex, glamour, and great clothes, Stacey Schmidt gets a taste of all these when he’s suddenly propelled from suburban model hell into the garment jungle of today’s Toronto. Stacey’s part black, part white, and apparently on a fast track to fame, fortune, and all the women he could ever want, though at times it seems as if he’s standing still. But does he really want the glitz?