National Network for Equitable Library Service

A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love at boarding school in nineteenth century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder Finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize National Bestseller Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young

When Gabriel Rivages recounts the life of Olympic gold medallist and silver-screen heart-throb Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), he brings to life a vibrant patchwork of America's 20th-century, from its athletic exploits to its literary underground, from its cinematic glory to its obscure failures.

In Apple S, the kaleidoscopic worldview of celebrated Québécois novelist Éric Plamondon sets its sights on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the seeds of Silicon Valley. Concluding a wide-lens journey through the American West that began with Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016) and continued with counter-culture poet Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018), the final installment of the 1984 Trilogy delivers a heart-rending meta-biography of a technological mastermind.

Writer Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s. In Mayonnaise, the second novel of Éric Plamondon's 1984 Trilogy, narrator Gabriel Rivages pieces together Brautigan's life starting in Oregon, where he was born, to San Francisco, where he became a poet and satirical novelist, and on to the Bolinas, California, where he committed suicide in 1984. Sifting through the ruins of Sixties idealism, Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism.

In the small hours of October 14, 1942, a German U-boat sank the passenger ferry SS Caribou in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Of the 237 people on board, 136 perished, including 49 civilians. In Land Beyond the Sea, bestselling author Kevin Major reimagines the events of that fateful night from the perspectives of both those aboard the doomed vessel and the German U-boat commander who gave the order. With his characteristically sharp, evocative prose style, Major delivers an epic work of historical fiction, detailing a life-and-death conflict in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

A whimsical and misanthropic imagining of Emily Dickinson's life. Paper Towns is a novelized account of Emily Dickinson's life, focusing on her childhood, the homes she lived in throughout her life, her family relationships, and her gradual reclusiveness, as she becomes consumed by getting words down on paper, and writing becomes an end in itself. Dickinson's childhood seems idyllic, and the headstrong Emily is both serious and fanciful. As she presses flowers between the pages of heavy books to preserve them, she reflects that books drink the water of flowers.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother's mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne's life. This is a fictionalized account of Suzanne's life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum.

In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly recreates the life of Berthe Morisot, the sole female member of the renowned group of artists known as the Impressionists. Inspired by true events, One Madder Woman charts her complicated relationship with her sister and rival, Edma, and her tumultuous love affair with Édouard Manet, the charismatic enfant terrible of the Paris Salon, against a backdrop of upheaval and war in mid-19th-century Paris.

Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel about the bloody folk legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam, and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia during the gold rush.

A horrific betrayal sets the destiny of the Alevizopoulos family, farmers who dare to choose a side in WWI and the Greco-Turkish war. Survival might mean leaving what is most precious: home. Finding Callidora follows four generations of the family as they carry and pass on the scars of the past and their need to find the place where they belong.