National Network for Equitable Library Service

Sweet Magnolias is now a Netflix original series! Ever since she discovered her ex-husband's affair, Dana Sue Sullivan decided to put down new roots and create the best restaurant in Serenity, South Carolina. After years of hard labor, her dream has become a reality. Sullivan's provides more than just Southern comfort food-it's become a haven for the whole town-and Dana Sue knows better than anyone that relying on friendship can get you through the toughest times.

"A year after the early death of his wife, John Davies comes hesitantly out of retirement to take a job at The Wheaton, a senior's residence. Having resisted 'getting involved' for his entire life, John is immediately out of his comfort zone. The Wheaton is a boundary-free environment, and he is immersed in the kinds of sticky matters he usually does his best to avoid. Surrounded by mortality and the ghosts of regret haunting many of the residents, John begins to do the unthinkable: relate to his fellow creatures and reconsider his past.

"Before Elizabeth Gaskell's famous North and South and Cranford, there was Mary Barton. Set in Manchester England in the mid-nineteenth century, Mary Barton was revolutionary in the way it tackled the relationship between poor mill workers and the wealthier manufacturers. This first book by Elizabeth Gaskell delves into the desperate lives of the working poor in Northern England, much in the way Dickens shone light on London's lowest classes. In Gaskell's eyes, prostitutes are selfless, murderers are penitent, and the poor are heroes."--

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and fatherare having trouble. Meanwhile, the world's in meltdown, and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common? Summer.

The author of In the Time of the Butterflies, with more than one million copies in print, is back with a tour de force. Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep.

It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. "You should've been born a boy," Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world.

It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy's Opa (grandfather) -- a devout Mennonite farmer -- might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, but as Wendy's life grows increasingly volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa's truth.

The novel's twelve central characters lead vastly different lives. Amma is an acclaimed playwright whose work explores her Black lesbian identity; her friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's underfunded schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness.

When Holly tells the story of the "PS, I Love You" letters, people start reaching out with one thing in common: they're terminally ill and want to leave their own missives behind for loved ones.