National Network for Equitable Library Service

When a young girl helps tend to her grandmother’s garden, she begins to notice things about her grandmother that make her curious. Why does her grandmother have long braided hair and wear beautifully coloured clothing? Why does she speak another language and spend so much time with her family? As she asks her grandmother about these things, she is told about life in a residential school a long time ago, where everything was taken away. When We Were Alone is a story about a difficult time in history and, ultimately, a story of empowerment and strength.

It’s 2006 and down-and-out protagonist Ghislain works as a reader for a publishing house in Montreal. He’s bored with all the wannabe writers who are determined to leave a trace of their passage on earth with their feeble attempts at literary arts.

Scrappy tough guy and three-time loser Johnny Keough seizes an unexpected "clean slate" opportunity as a sign from above and embarks on an epic hitchhiking journey across Canada to deliver his girlfriend's ashes to a fabled beach on the outskirts of Vancouver. This is the story of one man's kicking-and-screaming attempt to recuperate from a life of petty crime and shattered relationships, and somehow accept and maybe even like the new man emerging from within, the one he so desperately needs to become.

Book Four of the Silas Seaweed mysteries.

Police officer Silas Seaweed is thrown in the middle of a labyrinth of blackmail and murder when he sets off to unmask the culprit behind the 10-foot-tall bear he encountered on the outskirts of his hometown.

Book Five of the Silas Seaweed mysteries.

Silas Seaweed is back on the beat as the street-smart Coast Salish cop. A gardener is found dead and the prime suspects are two young local party girls. Silas is handed the case that soon takes a bloodier turn when a policeman's wife is killed.

Book Two of the Silas Seaweed mysteries.

Coast Salish street cop Silas Seaweed has his hands full. An elderly Jewish immigrant has disappeared. An old blind woman has been murdered. Valuable art stolen from German Jews during the Second World War has begun to show up for sale in Victoria''s auction houses, and the word on the street is that collectors are planning to loot a priceless Native archeological site.Unravelling these mysteries becomes a life-and-death quest, for when his investigation leads Seaweed into romance, it''s just...from publisher.

Book One of the Silas Seaweed mysteries.

In this latest short-story collection Josip Novakovich explores the shallow roots of emigration as he traverses North America from university post to writing residency. These stories take on an aura of memoir as they invite us into the privacy of his family experiences. Novakovich is in search of a natural existence, whether it be living close to the land or raising animals.

An intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, tightly constructed novel, Brother explores questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991.

With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home.

The characters in these thirteen masterful and engaging stories exist on the edge of danger, where landscapes melt into dreamscapes and every house is haunted. A drug dealer’s girlfriend signs up for the first manned mission to Mars. A girl falls in love with a man who wants to turn her into a bird. Two teenaged girls test their relationship by breaking into suburban houses. A wife finds a gaping hole in the floor of the home she shares with her husband, a hole that only she can see.