National Network for Equitable Library Service

After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he's blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply.

Seventeen-year-old Jemma's older brother took her in when she needed to get away from her abusive ex-boyfriend, Razor. All Jemma wants now is to be a good mom to her baby daughter, Violet. But one night she needs to go out, just for a few minutes, to get diapers and ice cream. On her way back, she witnesses the drive-by shooting of a kid, Kwame, who lives in the same building. The driver is Razor. Jemma is terrified. If she tells anyone what she saw, they'll know she left her baby alone and she might lose custody. But if she doesn't, Kwame's killer will go free.

Jake has fallen hard for Genny, and now he's brought her home to meet the family. As he introduces her to Poplar Lake, he amuses her with innocent ­anecdotes about his childhood, and regales her with the story of the town's founding and the scoundrels, bootleggers, progressives and visionaries who shaped it-all the while dodging and deflecting questions about his own past. Genny knows he's hiding something. Does it involve his first love Tammy, or his enigmatic friend Clinton Sturgis, or his brother Victor, whom he hero-worships to this day?

Uprooted, longing for love and to feel somehow situated, Willa Jackson flees life as a military wife when she meets Hugh, the lighthouse keeper on McNabs Island in Halifax Harbour. The object of her fantasies, a musician, he's the last of a dying breed in this story set during the final days of lightkeeping before automation. Romanced by this magical location-so close to the city and its lively communities, yet so remote-she involves her ten-year-old son, Alex, in her escape.

When Emily and her family move back to Nova Scotia from Calgary, it is a return to the coastal landscape that already haunts her-and the waters where her father died. She meets her neighbour Linda, a gruff but loving widow and Linda's grown son, Tom, who struggles to stay on an even keel. As they settle in, Emily and her husband, Daniel, learn more about the short but turbulent history of the house they've just bought.

Surviving the Halifax Explosion is one thing, but how do Lucy Caines and her wayward husband, Harry, a couple who lose everything to the event's horrors, make peace with their grief? Rebuilding on the rustic shores of Halifax's Northwest Arm, steps from where the shaft of Mont Blanc's anchor lands that fateful day in 1917. But coping with the disappearance on that day of their infant daughter, they descend into an isolating denial: Lucy through guilt and reticence, and Harry through drinking and gambling.

Abandoned on the steps of a Belgian convent as a baby, thirteen-year-old Grace has grown up among the nuns. But her days as a caretaker and companion for her older sister, Dotty, have come to a sad end with Dotty's death, and now Grace is living among the girls who attend the convent's boarding school-the very same girls who taunted and bullied her sister for having Down syndrome. Grace desperately wants to know who left her at the convent; she wants a family and to not feel alone in the world.

The story begins with Nell, the "spinster on the hill" near St. Peter's, Cape Breton. Scarred by her own childhood, she swears she could never love a child and that she will never marry, denying herself a life with the man she loves. She's proven wrong when a baby is born just down the road from her. Her love of little Jane, despite herself, propels us forward through generations trying to untangle their own traumas and secrets. Eventually, we meet Bridie-joyful, kind, capable Bridie-and see her struggling through the echoing pain of those who came before her.

Dan Ainslie, a brilliant doctor working with the miners of his native Cape Breton Island, is forty-two and deeply in love with his wife. Longing for the son he can never have, he comes to love the young Alan MacNeil, whose father deserted him and his mother several years before. Alan's father's return brings tragedy to those around him.

Lovers Fall Back to Earth is a human drama about three sisters, the men they marry, and the repercussions in their lives when disaster strikes. The sisters fall in love while they are at university and the three couples become part of a group of students who are shaped by the ideas of the sixties and who meet to discuss ideas of liberty, politics, and environmentalism. Young and idealistic revolutionaries, they believe they can change the world, as they hold forth in the smoking room where they spout philosophies about personal freedom.