National Network for Equitable Library Service

Sebastian Synard is back. It's the off-season, and the Newfoundland tour guide introduced in One for the Rock has crossed the island with his spirited teenage son for a weekend exploring the wonders of Gros Morne National Park. But on a hike across the spectacular rockscape of The Tablelands, they discover the half-buried body of a murder victim. Life as a tour guide had its twists and turns, but now Sebastian--with his offhand, Scotch-enriched nature--is crossing a more dangerous landscape, on a path that will leave him face-to-face with a killer.

For decades, the Holloways have operated a convenience store in the working-class neighborhood of Rabbittown in St. John's, and every customer has a story. In a vibrant, contemporary family saga, filled with idiosyncratic characters, Trudy Morgan-Cole tells the tale of three generations of Holloway women--Ellen, Audrey, and Rachel--their loves and their livelihood in times of great change. Most Anything You Please captures the spirit of a community and the women who hold it together, revealing the bonds that break and the ties that bind.

With birth, death, contemplation, and close calls, Send More Tourists ... the Last Ones Were Delicious explores how we respond to the weight of social expectations. From the hidden pressures of wall paint and tarot card predictions, to the burden of phone numbers and the dismembering of saints, Waddleton takes us on a surrealist road trip through the missteps of her vivid characters with honesty and compassion. These are stories of survival.

In late 2008, as the world's economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario - not to be confused with Milton, Ontario - leaves his parents' basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless twenty-something Millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah - Leonard Cohen.

In twelve dialed-in and exceptionally honed short stories, Terry Doyle presents an enduring assortment of characters channelled through the chain reactions of misfortune and redemption. A construction worker's future is bound to a feckless and suspicious workmate. A young woman's burgeoning social activism is constrained by hardship and the desperation of selling puppies online. A wedding guest recognizes a panhandler attending the reception. And a man crafts a concealed weapon with which to carry out his nightly circuit of paltry retribution.

Sixty-two-year-old English professor Hugh Norman is getting ready to retire and just going through the motions. He's detached, irreverent, and quite pleased with himself. But then he learns of a long-lost friend's sudden death, and shockingly discovers a body while walking through a city park. Suddenly, over just a few days, Hugh is compelled to deal with a large cast of eccentric characters and a police detective who has taken a sudden interest in his life.

Daisy's job is to be as unobtrusive as possible. But when her father suddenly leaves and her mother breaks down, Daisy's old life disappears, and she is set free in the rift created between her parents.

Think the world can’t get any crazier? Think again. Set in near-future Toronto, Skeet Love tells the story of Shane, a conspiracy theorist and aspiring rapper; Nina, his girlfriend; and Brit, the couple’s lover. Wildly suspecting the threesome is under surveillance by a secretive religious cult, Shane moves the group to seek refuge with his father, a smuggler and taxidermist. And then the truth really gets weird. Craig Francis Power’s third novel is an uber-cool drug and sex-fuelled critique of the world we think we know.

This is the story of a small group of English immigrants and their struggle to establish a community and livelihood in the forbidding environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in mid-environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in the mid-1800s.

In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew.