National Network for Equitable Library Service

West meets East as bootleggers and cops tangle with opium smugglers and corrupt officials in a new kind of gang warfare. Prospect Avenue is nothing more than a dirt road ending in bulrushes behind a roadhouse. It’s a popular rendezvous point along the Detroit River for bootleggers like Jack McCloskey. But there’s more than just rum-running going on these days; there’s a growing trade in opium and people, as McCloskey finds out when he rescues the survivor of a bad smuggling deal.

It is the summer of 1933 and young Haven Cattrell, seeking work, finds himself abandoned in the small northern Ontario town of Davisville. At an exclusive summer camp for girls he befriends Wetherby Moss and his son Jude who introduce him to the joys and heartaches of jazz. Jazz had taken a hard blow, during the first-half of the 1930s. Although there was still work to be had for some in places like New York, musicians in other parts of the country were barely existing on what venues remained.

Set in post-war Communist Hungary, in the fictional town of Békes, Never, Again is the story of seven-year-old Tomi Wolfstein, the son of Holocaust survivors who have never told him anything about their past experiences in the concentration camps.

After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he's blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply.

The mystery surrounding Anna Grieve and her mentally fragile older sister, Esther, begins in Russia in the 1880s. The persecution of Jews has become so vicious that the girls' mother decides to send her children to Winnipeg with her wealthy employers. Her intention is to join them, but the sisters never see their parents again. Frightened and cut adrift, each girl reacts differently to her new family in North America. Esther's beauty and glamorous lifestyle hide the fact that she is losing herself to mental illness brought on by a trauma during her childhood in Russia.

Seventeen-year-old Christina McBurney has led a sheltered life. But when her twin brother, Jonathan, dies of consumption, Christina, unwilling to be farmed out as a nursemaid or teacher, runs away from home and her destiny. In Owen Sound she boards the Asia, a steamship that transports passengers and freight throughout the Great Lakes. She doesn't really have a plan other than to get to Sault Ste. Marie. She'll figure things out once she's settled. But a violent storm suddenly rises on Georgian Bay, and the overloaded and top-heavy steamship begins to sink.

The Third Act deals with the intercultural struggles faced by Chinese students studying in North America in the present day and by an American playwright, Neil Peterson, caught up in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. The contemporary story focuses on three Chinese friends (Tone, Pike and Theresa) who grapple in their own ways with the pressure to succeed in an unfamiliar culture. The historical tale concerns Peterson's effort to find his literary voice and save the woman he loves amidst the chaos and horror of the fall of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Through Sunlight and Shadows is an autobiographical novel about a young boy set in the small New Brunswick town of Bannonbridge in the 1940s and 1950s. The story is told from the perspective of an older man, Walt Macbride, a character well known to readers of other Raymond Fraser novels. "When I think back to those early days," he says, "my first feeling is of darkness inside our home, and sunshine in the yard outside.

Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and returned to Nova Scotia. Determined to tell the stories of the brave soldiers who served, Bird became one of the most prolific authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works. For nearly two decades following the war, Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have now gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity-until now.

Abandoned on the steps of a Belgian convent as a baby, thirteen-year-old Grace has grown up among the nuns. But her days as a caretaker and companion for her older sister, Dotty, have come to a sad end with Dotty's death, and now Grace is living among the girls who attend the convent's boarding school-the very same girls who taunted and bullied her sister for having Down syndrome. Grace desperately wants to know who left her at the convent; she wants a family and to not feel alone in the world.