National Network for Equitable Library Service

Amid the Cultural Revolution, Nina Huang says goodbye to her boyfriend, Dahai, who plans to join the Vietcong in the Vietnam War, and sneaks across the bay by boat to Hong Kong where she is granted political asylum in the United States. After her escape from mainland China and subsequent immigration to the U.S. and later to Canada, Nina's employment and education, and her experiences with romantic/sexual relationships, are a radical departure from the moral code she knew in China.

Ever since anthropology PhD student Clara Lemont started researching the African-Brazilian religion of Odùn, her days and nights became filled with dreams of swirling figures of white, drum beats and yellow eyes haunting her in the darkness. When Clara travels to Brazil to do fieldwork, she quickly finds herself immersed in a world of dark intrigue, political corruption, black magic and desire.

This collection presents an arc of historical experience of Jewish child and teen life during the Shoah. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the young and hunted in these stories hide in forests; survive in ghettoes and camps; and assume new identities. The stories in this collection depict children as creative, resilient, aged-before their time, as they adapt to their unconscionable reality.

Incidental Music visits the troubled and fascinating period of the Hungarian Revolution, within its larger context of the Communist post-war years in Eastern Europe, explores Toronto’s heritage and urban development, takes a sober outsider view of Canadian society and politics, and last, but not least, revels in the beauty of the opera—all through the tumultuous and passionate love affairs of its main characters. The lives of the three protagonists overlap, but there is never any unison.

Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons draws on the lost histories of the women descended from African slaves who resisted English rule during the 1857 uprising in Lucknow, India. The book is about the event that triggered Queen Victoria’s reign in India for almost a century, and illuminates new and important female, Muslim perspectives on what has been called the first war of Indian independence. Lucknow in 1856 is the most opulent city in India. If the English take it over, the royal family and centuries of rich, cosmopolitan culture will disappear.

One Italian Renaissance painter created stunning portraits of warmth and sensitivity, caught Michelangelo’s favourable attention, served the most powerful monarch of the time, and achieved international renown. But that artist fell into obscurity for one reason – she was a woman. Sofonisba Anguissola’s abilities as a painter, evident while still in her mid-teens, combined with her father’s promotional efforts, made her well known in her native northern Italy. That fame led to a position as a lady-in-waiting to the young wife of King Philip ii of Spain.

God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason.

Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in Ile d’Or, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late twentieth century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today.

Stony Point tells the story of a woman who succeeds in doing things at a time when custom restricts her from doing anything. In 1903, shortly after the Frank slide, a newspaper reporter vanishes from a mining town in the Crowsnest Pass. Lucille travels to Stony Point in search of her sister's husband. She finds a town under the heel of a ruthless mine owner who has the local Mounted Policeman and a corrupt businessman in his pocket. Determined to find Stanley Birch, Lucille turns Stony Point upside-down.

Holy Rule takes place during three weeks in October, 1958, focusing on the lives of a group of nuns who teach at St. Monica’s Girls’ School. During this time of high autumn, the pope lies dying in Rome — and then finally dies — while thousands of miles away life carries on among the students and teaching nuns in St. Monica’s Girls’ School. The girls—Gwen, J.J., Sally — are living in the adolescent space between childhood and adulthood and are testing their limits with their nun-teachers.