National Network for Equitable Library Service

Cuba is the place where the grandchildren of peasants become consultant surgeons, but also the place where necessity as the mother of invention is put into extreme practise. In Havana, the buildings like the peoples’ dreams, are constantly being restored.

The Heart Begins Here is the story of the ever-optimistic, earnest Sara Requier and her disintegrating seven-year relationship with the cynical Wanda Wysoka. Along with her relationship struggles, Sara must contend with the drastic changes in the book industry that threaten her feminist bookstore, and as a mother who refuses to accept her daughter's lesbianism. Then, just as Wanda decides to leave Sara, Wanda's new young lover, Cindy, is murdered.

Kavita Gupta is a woman in transition. When her troubled older brother, Sunil, disappears, she does everything in her power to find him, convinced that she can save him. Ten days later, the police arrive at her door to inform her that Sunil's body has been found. Her world is devastated. She finds herself in crisis mode, trying to keep the pieces of her life from falling apart even more. As she tries to cope with her loss, the support system around her begins to unravel. Her parents' uneasy marriage seems more precarious.

Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out. The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline.

Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife addresses themes of destiny and the repercussions of our choices. Before she dies, actress Alma Joncas instructs her husband to bury her ashes where she was happiest. He decides that was their garden. But relatives, friends and Alma's colleagues disagree. After they tell him where they think she was happiest, not only is he no longer sure about the garden, he wonders if he truly knew the woman he was married to for twenty-four years.

Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali's kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel. In Land for Fatimah, Anjali involves herself in Fatimah's quest to find new land for her scattered community, and is thrown into a web of intrigue that upturns her safe, orderly world.

He tells her about cases he remembers. The two young women found in the forest, the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels, the casket that caught on fire at the funeral. He reveals the secrets of his profession. The powder that comes in a ketchup-sized packet and is injected into the cheeks for that blushing look, the candle wax used to reconstruct parts of a skull, the perfectly weighted stones in a repatriated soldier's casket. These are the notes of a life spent facing death, of a daughter trying to make sense of her father.

Maple Sugar Pie is the story of Hazel Whitford and her family's past, Told through old black and white photographs, we see the events that caused deep fractures in her family and her estrangement from her husband and all but one of her living children. We also see the story through the eyes of Hazel's grandson Michael's wife Jennifer, who live with the elderly Hazel for five years. After Hazel's death Jen and Mike's future on the farm, and the small business Jen has started on the farm could be in jeopardy.

The Whitbread Award-winning author of A Good Man in Africa and the Costa Award-winning Restless now gives us a sweeping new novel that unfolds across fin-de-siecle Europe as it tells a story of ineffable passions'familial, artistic, romantic'and their power to shape, and destroy, a life. Brodie Moncur is a brilliant piano tuner, as brilliant in his own way as John Kilbarron'"The Irish Liszt"'the pianist Brodie accompanies on all of his tours from Paris to Saint Petersburg, as essential to Kilbarron as the pianist's own hands.

An exquisite new collection of short stories from award-winning author Simon Van Booy. Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people's stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a powerful collection of short fiction that takes readers into the innermost lives of everyday people.