National Network for Equitable Library Service

Although it is 1969 and the end of a decade that has brought tremendous social change even in southweatern Ontario, 14-year-old Annie Ward has experienced little of "love, peace, and understanding." A diehard Beatles fan and highly intelligent but lacking in social graces, Annie is still grieving over the death of her father and also misses Zoe, the one "best" friend she ever had, who has moved away due to less-than-friendly circumstances. Lonely but proud, Annie has distanced herself from everyone, even her mother.

First published in 1960, in Morning at Jalna it is 1863 and the American Civil War is raging south of the border. Still in its early years, the Jalna estate seems far away from the despair and destruction. Philip, who will grow up to become the master of Jalna, has just come into the world, while Augusta, Nicholas, and Ernest are children. Life at Jalna is as peaceful as usual until the Sinclairs come to visit. They arrive with the polished manners and soft accents of Old Carolina and quickly appeal to Adeline’s sense of hospitality.

Home child Mary Janeway runs away from her farm placement, grows into adulthood, and ultimately comes to terms with life in Hamilton, Ontario. Sixteen-year-old Mary Janeway, a home child, is desperate to escape from her rural home child placement and flees to London, Ontario, to find a domestic position.

Folktale, memoir, fiction, literary hoax, The Yellow Briar is all of these. Ostensibly the charming remembrance of an Irish orphan who escapes the Great Famine of 1840s Ireland and comes to the New World to seek a fresh start on the streets of Toronto and in the pioneer hinterland of Canada West (Ontario), the book was actually a fictional humbug perpetrated by John Mitchell, a Toronto lawyer, who first published the tale in 1933. Patrick Slater, the protagonist of the "memoir," is said to have died in 1924 but not before setting his saga down on paper. And what an account it is!

Music in The Dark is a compelling novel set in Prohibition-era Montreal when alcohol, drugs and jazz music ruled “Sin City.” Taylor Williams is a young black musician struggling to find fame in the Montreal Harlem District amid gangsters, racism and bootleggers. As a young boy, Taylor escaped a terrifying ordeal that haunts him as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jazz musician.

On an October night in 1899 the body of a well-regarded city councilman is found floating under a Halifax wharf. Detective Inspector Culligan Baxter embarks on an investigation that leads from the waterfront, through the city's streets, and out into the surrounding countryside. Aided by the young but surprisingly astute Kenny Squire and an odd assortment of barkeeps, petty thieves, and prostitutes, Baxter's sleuthing takes him into the station's back files and along a path of connections and corruption, linking some of the city's most prominent businessmen.

Allan Donaldson's first novel, Maclean, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Donaldson's new novel is a literary mystery set in the fictional town of Wakefield, New Brunswick, against the backdrop of the Second World War. Following a night at The Silver Dollar dance hall, a teenage girl turns up dead in a gravel pit. The last person reported to have seen her is Owen Williams, an introverted soldier stationed with the local garrison of "Zombies"-conscripted men unwilling to serve overseas.

She came walking out of the desert, just as the famous poet Rimbaud had centuries before. Now the nameless woman lies horribly scarred and close to death in an asylum deep in the North African desert. An Australian official, a man code-named John Devlin, has come to question her. It is clear that the woman and Devlin share some kind of past, and all kinds of secrets. As the wind calls up a deadly sandstorm, the inhabitants of the asylum discover they are linked by a diary written by Rimbaud. Over the next 120 years, everyone who sees the diary will want it.

In 1939, Alfred Day had wanted war. And when he got it, he found purpose in its turmoil: he found his proper role as tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew; and -- most extraordinary of all -- he found Joyce, a woman to love. But now, that's all gone: the war took it away. And maybe the war has taken him away, too. Before Hitler and the bombs, Alfred was a boy in Staffordshire, helpless to defend his mother and resist his abusive father. The RAF gave him order, skills, another family, a way to be a man.

Alastair Luce is a dreamer, one of three who tell this tale. A Canadian expat in the 1950s, he lives in a New York City suburb with his wife, Nora, a passionate American who misses the excitement of wartime life and finds an outlet — and a lover — during the Red scare. Alastair's an artist, a quiet man who paints houses for a living, fears atomic holocaust, drinks too much and worries about his suffering child, Grace. Just before the accident that kills his daughter's best friend Todd, he offers a ride to their teenage neighbour, Claire Bernard.