National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Wondrous Woo tells the story of Miramar Woo who is the quintessential Chinese girl: nice, quiet, and reserved. The eldest of the three Woo children, Miramar is ever the obedient sister and daughter ... on the outside. On the inside, she’s a kick-ass kung fu heroine with rock star flash, sassy attitude, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. Just as Miramar is about to venture forth on the real adventure of leaving home for university, her beloved father is killed in an accident. Miramar watches helplessly as her family unravels in the aftermath of her father’s death.

After her plans for the future are disrupted by an unexpected breakup, Benni, born and raised in northern Ontario, seeks escape from her everyday routine by visiting her father in the Philippines – the fantastical land of ghosts and glamour that her parents described to her as a child. In the Philippines, Benni discovers that the father she adores is an alcoholic whose health is endangered by his alcoholism, and she is captivated by the luxurious lifestyle of the wealthy members of her mother’s family.

In the thirteen stories that comprise Truth and Other Fictions, by Eva Tihanyi, women take centre stage as they experience the slippery relationship between art and truth, not merely as an aesthetic concept but a reality in their lives. Art here is present in many forms and brought closely into the personal realm of the people involved with it: the paintings of Picasso, the photographs of Brassaï, the songs of Billie Holiday, the emotional impact of opera, the literature of Hemingway and Durrell, the intellect of Sontag.

Amid the Cultural Revolution, Nina Huang says goodbye to her boyfriend, Dahai, who plans to join the Vietcong in the Vietnam War, and sneaks across the bay by boat to Hong Kong where she is granted political asylum in the United States. After her escape from mainland China and subsequent immigration to the U.S. and later to Canada, Nina's employment and education, and her experiences with romantic/sexual relationships, are a radical departure from the moral code she knew in China.

A sequel to The Girls of Piazza d’Amore, this novel is a sweeping epic that chronicles the lives of three women of different generations, all living in Montreal, but connected and haunted by the same Italian village past. After her childhood friend, Lucia— protagonist of The Girls of Piazza D’Amore — is found beaten, an apparent victim of domestic violence, and Lucia’s husband disappears, Cathy, a high school teacher, takes Lucia’s daughter, Angie, into her home. This arrangement causes conflict between Cathy and her live-in boyfriend, Sean.

Evie Troy, an impulsive and funny young Jewish woman, has a tendency to overcomplicate things. And that can get her into trouble. When her dying friend Jean-Gabriel, a successful and controversial francophone writer, cons her into carrying out his last wish, delivering a monetary mea-culpa to his ex-wife Amélie, Evie decides she knows better. In a fit of misguided generosity, she appropriates his cash to help set herself up as a surrogate mother on behalf of the barren Amélie, a plan she keeps so secret not even Amélie has an inkling a baby is headed her way.

A group of tourists gather in Namibia. Some have come to holiday, others to murder. Canadian Kate ditches her two-timing boyfriend and heads to Africa on a whim, hoping for adventure, encountering the unexpected and proving an intrepid adversary to mayhem. The tour is led by Jono, a Zimbabwean historian and philosopher, and the travellers follow him from Cape Town into the Namib desert, learning ancient secrets of the Bushmen, the power of witchcraft and superstition, and even the origins of Nazi evil.

This novel traces the life experiences of a once highly successful woman who falls prey to electroshock and subsequently struggles, partly successfully, partly in vain, to piece back together her life. Naomi Cohan Smith suffers enormous memory loss; additionally, an estrangement from her family of origin that she has no way to wrap her mind around. The novel begins with her wandering the corridor of St. Patricks-St Andrews Mental Health Centre (St.

Like the many surfaces of a gemstone, the varied aspects of human experience link the short stories in this collection, titled Aspects of Nature. Themes of finding one’s identity; conflicts of family, career and romance; loneliness, death, loss, and feelings of displacement; youth and aging; courage and fear; human frailty; spirituality; compassion and manifestations of evil, all are at the heart of this collection.

Silent Girl explores the experiences of unforgettable characters as they follow trajectories unimagined by Shakespeare, including a young girl who is unwittingly sold to traffickers after losing her mother in the 2004 tsunami in the title story; an ambitious, proud student in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who finds her dreams taken hostage in Kesh Kumay; a young woman in an interracial marriage who devises a desperate plan to help her tortured husband after his return from Vietnam in Nobody; I Myself; two women and an older man who discover how fluid the boundaries of gender can be in Cocktails Wi