National Network for Equitable Library Service

London 1661, the new king is on the throne, but old religious beliefs and Medieval superstition still prevail. Catholics are not tolerated in this new era. Edgar and Emmatha Torbet are papists and fraternal twins, which means their mother was an adulteress. One of them is a legitimate heir, the other is a bastard. Which one of them is it?

Set in Toronto, this short novel is a portrait of two pivotal times in the life of Miriam Moscowitz. The first section describes her experiences as a bright young university student in the 1950s and recounts the discrimination she faced as a woman; the second section revisits Miriam's life half a century later, exploring the changes in her community and within herself. This book illustrates how people are shaped by--and can eventually overcome--the constraints of the times they occupy.

Lucien and Nataša might have slipped toward love, if her past in Sarajevo hadn't caught up with her. Nataša finds work modeling for a painter in Toronto, but he is murdered. Nataša disappears that night, running for her life. Her vanishing is connected to the discovery of a video, secretly filmed in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Butterfly is a novel that charts a controlled descent through the dark legacy of war and the underbelly of the global art scene ... into a world ruled by a desperate hope for impossible redemption.

When Pugg, dog to eighteenth-century printmaker William Hogarth, finds a leather portmanteau abandoned beneath his master's deathbed, the bereaved canine embarks on an inquiry to make sense of the disordered contents. Notes from a criminal investigation, letters between sisters, a pair of novels, and the personal reflection of one Sarah Scott lead Pugg on a journey through London's streets, high and low.

A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby's grandparent's immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny's life in 1920s Chicago-the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition-and Ruby's subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto.

In 1858, the British took over the city of Lucknow, paving the way for Queen Victoria's reign over India. But what happened to Begam Hazrat Mahal, the woman of African-Indian descent who had valiantly organized a final key resistance to British rule, and to her ex-husband, Wajid 'Ali Shah, the last King in India, who remained imprisoned by the British? The Envy of Paradise tells their stories. Jocelyn Cullity's English family lived in India for five generations.

There Are Victories is a proto-feminist, anti-Bildungsroman that explores the intersections of misogyny, class, religion, and prejudice within upper class Anglo-Montreal and New York City society before, during, and after WWI. Originally published in 1933, There Are Victories takes up the catastrophe of the home front and the ways in which the life-and happiness-of the novel's protagonist, Ruth Courtney, is continually undermined by the bad behaviour of men. This new edition will feature an introduction by Johanna Skibsrud.

Tenth-Century Iceland. In the darkness of midwinter, two friends set out on an adventure but end up killing a man. Kjaran, a travelling poet who trades songs for food and shelter, and Gunnar, a feared warrior, must make a choice: conceal the deed or confess to the crime and pay the blood price to the family.

Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba.

In 1907, the fifteen-year-old French-Canadian Ernest Dufault left his home in Quebec for Montana, where he was promptly arrested as a cattle thief and, as a prisoner of the state of Nevada, passed himself off as an American cowboy named Will James. Over the next few decades, Dufault, a.k.a. James, would flourish as a cowboy and horsebreaker and go on to become an artist, a soldier, a Hollywood stuntman, a bestselling author of award-winning westerns - and his own false memoir.