National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears. Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death- a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt.

In his high-rise condo in downtown Toronto, Dr. Chen awakens to the sound of streetcars below, but it is not the early morning traffic that keeps him from sleep. News banners run across his phone: Fentanyl Crisis; Toxic Drug Supply; A Record-Setting Number of Deaths. From behind the headlines, on the same screen, glow the faces of his patients, the faces of the what-ifs: What if he had done more, or less; what if he had done something different? Would any of those patients still be alive?

A 224 page comics anthology celebrating the comic creators connected to Alberta, featuring 43 short comic stories and cartoons inspired by the theme 'home'. Within the pages you will find a curious mix of pathos, optimism, humour, hope, and reflections on all the different things 'home' really means.

Living in different worlds and separated by an ocean, a father and son try to stay connected through the power of imagination as their distanced lives pull them further apart. Awale takes a job as a cab driver in Canada's remote city of Yellowknife in order to provide for his family back home in Gaalkaycyo, Somalia. As his wife Warsan and young son Afrah struggle with his absence, Awale creates a world-building epic inspired by the wonders of his new Arctic home, in order to keep his son close to him.

Impulsive young Prince Siegfried craves glory and recognition from his aloof parents, the king and queen of Denmark. Starting a war with a neighbouring country and seeking out the most feared dragon in the realm seems like a good place to start. An epic tale full of action, adventure, mythological beasts, magical swords, powerful rings, and a treacherous companion. Adapted from the ancient Norse mythological Völsunga Saga, Siegfried: Dragon Slayer is the first in a two-part series by Canadians Mark Allard-Will and Jasmine Redford.

Someone is stringing up blood drained corpses across the city, in what appear to be ritual killings, leaving the cops scrambling for answers before more bodies pile up. Meanwhile, Sun, a young woman recently added to the ranks of the blood sucking undead, feeds her hunger and rage on the men she feels deserve her wrath. Along with the police, more than one legendary vampire has their sights set on her too. A tale of blood, monsters, and those that walk amongst them seeking to help us all.

Patsy Keane survived her childhood, and some days that's all that matters. As the child of an alcoholic mother, Patsy is not prone to nostalgia. She lives in a world of her own creation, where Beverly Keane's maternal shortcomings are just a bad memory. It would be a perfect world if Patsy wasn't eternally haunted by the memory of what really happened on the day her sister Kathleen went missing-and by the foolish lie she told that day. She's lived with it for forty-two years. Since that terrible time, Patsy has distanced herself from everyone and everything in her past.

Set on a US college campus in 1964, In the Defense of Liberty is a powerful, fast-paced novel exploring gender nonconformity and the reach of history. It's 1964, and the students at Merida University in Ohio can sense that something is brewing -- the campus is rippling with undercurrents of anger and alienation. As they work to make sense of the rapidly shifting cultural and ideological climate, the four main characters of In the Defense of Liberty are also consumed by their own personal dramas.

A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind. Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the eighteen stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate's fiancě and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder.

End Times is an astounding debut collection of stories about evangelical culture, ideological polarization, and the messiness and mysteries of humanity. A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant tries to help a rural fundamentalist teen, while her own secular life unravels in Toronto, Davos, and beyond. An atheist doctor attempts to expose a hipster megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite.