National Network for Equitable Library Service

From the acclaimed author of Lemon comes a clever and heartbreaking new novel of love and revelation

Harriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.

At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of a modern couple's apartment. In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives voice to the anguish of a generation of people who grew up with great expectations, and are now settling into their own personal failures and compromises: James is obsessed with completing his life's work.

A hilarious coming-of-age novel about the pain of young love, family secrets, and sick ferrets

Fifteen-year-old Jacob feels almost on the inside: almost smart, almost funny, almost good-looking, almost worthy of falling in love. His sister is too busy dating guys in Whitesnake jackets to notice, and his best friend is occupied with his own painful pubescent crisis. Jacob’s mother has just started a curious (and rather un-Christian) holy war with the church across the street, while his father has secretly moved into the garage.

While most of the action takes place in Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, this whirlwind tour of long-separated twins also lands in Hawaii, London, Scotland, Madrid, and Mallorca. The twins — Curt, an Australian jazz musician, and William, a Canadian visual artist — were driven in different directions at the age of four when their drug-addict father separated from their mother. She soon found she could not feed the children and had to give them up. At age 27, they learn of each other’s existence and begin a journey that draws them together from different ends of the world.

A brilliant, darkly comic, and startlingly honest novel, A Week of This follows the lives of an extended family over one increasingly desperate week. At the centre of the novel is 38-year-old Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman who has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents' messy divorce.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry delivers the sequel to his enormously popular novel Terms of Endearment (RB# 90067), also an Academy Award-winning motion picture. Aurora Greenway is now dealing with the trials and tribulations of her grandchildren, who she raised after the death of her daughter. With humor and care, McMurtry presents a fulfilling tale of growing old and moving on.

After her mother leaves home, Rae Dodson, only a child, must care for her grief-stricken father. Rae is forced to grow up quickly in a time of change, seeking to understand the actions of the adults who surround her.

In To the Wedding John Berger offers us a sharply modern situation set in the traditionally pastoral and idyllic background of rural Europe. Beautiful, vibrant Ninon falls in love and becomes engaged to a young Italian, Gino, but soon before their wedding she discovers that she has contracted HIV through a brief encounter several years earlier. She tries to break the engagement but Gino, in an act of passionate and redemptive love, insists that the marriage will occur.

Winner of both the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, Rachel Cusk was hailed by Granta magazine as one of the best young British novelists. When Thomas Bradshaw quits work to look after his young daughter, his wife Tonie rediscovers her long-dormant career ambitions. But the couple's extended families have plenty to say about this domestic switch.

District Attorney Nina Frost and her husband, Caleb, face a nightmare when they discover that their young son Nathaniel has been molested, a trauma that has left him mute, terrified, and unable to reveal the identity of his attacker.