National Network for Equitable Library Service

A fast-paced literary eco-thriller about the power of resistance, the fine line between activism and terrorism, and what happens when things go too far. Set in 1993 on Vancouver Island, a group of idealistic young activists, determined to do whatever it takes to protect the environment, turn to sabotage. But in a single moment everything they've worked for goes horribly wrong, when a night watchman at a logging company warehouse is killed in an explosion that they set. Two Roads Home follows these activists as their lives-- and their cause-- spiral out of control.

After Morgan Wells's wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells - but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto. On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ever written.

The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how--sloppily. Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak's editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly indifferent student body. But trouble looms large when a big-money free daily comes to the west-coast campus, threatening to swallow what remains of their readership whole.

A'isha Nasir is a Nigerian teenager who has been charged with adultery. She is sentenced to death by stoning--a sentence to be carried out after her daughter is weaned. Sophie MacNeil is an ambitious, though inexperienced, Canadian journalist living in Nigeria. Speechless is the story of how their lives become intertwined in a fast-paced tale of justice, witness, and courage. Speechless offers a thoughtful and complex view of how stories are told. Who should tell a story? What happens when one speaks on behalf of another?

These ten strikingly original stories explore love and escape--how we escape to love, escape through love, and escape ourselves and hold on to love. Together, the stories of Welcome to the Circus highlight the courageous, acrobatic circus acts we all learn to perform in search of love.

"In any skin purple is a heavy tone that penetrates to the core." Paulo da Costa's stories get under your skin, bruise your consciousness with their exploration of the forces that hold us together, not always benignly, and those that pull us apart. A hunter and cougar ponder the positions of predator and prey under the dense canopy of a West Coast forest. A nine-year-old girl tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her.

Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic that will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Barbara Gowdy, and Jonathan Lethem, and readers of both speculative fiction and literary fiction alike. Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, academics researching erotica, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them.

In Prerequisites for Sleep, her first published short story collection, Jennifer L. Stone has created a fictional world rich with dilemmas.

When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the politics so dear to Eleanor, but a life-threatening plot.

Grief cannot abide a mystery. No one understands that better than the Clareys of Halifax, a close and loving family whose lives are transformed one night in 1937 when Edie, their wilful daughter and sister, vanishes, leaving no trace, no clue, as to what happened to her. The lingering question of her disappearance will ricochet through succeeding generations of Clareys.