National Network for Equitable Library Service

Precocious ten-year-old Vanessa Dudley-Morris knows lots of secrets. In 1949 when she and her family are forced to move into two rooms on the second floor of 519 Jarvis Street in Toronto, a genteel but somewhat rundown rooming house owned by a reclusive pianist, she learns a lot more. Despite the family's drastically reduced circumstances, her parents struggle to keep up their old standards. Threatened by blindness due to an eye condition, Vanessa is kept at home, tutored by an erratic succession of eccentrics, some with questionable credentials.

Upon the death of their art-loving parents, two young Jewish adolescents are kidnapped by a family friend and taken to a brothel. There they are held captive by their shared shame and by the younger sister's forced addiction to morphine. Love and psychodrama gives them the courage to finally escape Vienna. Once in England, however, Hedy discovers her younger sister Susannah longs to be independent--and in Italy.

A poignant picture of love and loyalty, and based on historical events, The Envy of Paradise is a fictional account of four people who played key roles during the 1857 uprising in Lucknow, one of the most significant resistances to English rule in India.

The award-winning sequel to Random Passage. Waiting for Time, the sequel to the best-selling Random Passage, completes the epic saga of the inhabitants of Cape Random. Here, Bernice Morgan tells the story of the strong-willed and enigmatic Mary Bundle, one of the most beloved characters in Newfoundland fiction, and introduces us to Lav Andrews, a descendant of the Andrews family living in contemporary Newfoundland—a place where the past shapes the future.

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.

This is the story of a small group of English immigrants and their struggle to establish a community and livelihood in the forbidding environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in mid-environment of Cape Random on the NE coast of Newfoundland in the mid-1800s.

In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew.

Chorus of Mushrooms heralds the debut of a young Japanese Canadian feminist, Hiromi Goto. Until the publication of Chorus of Mushrooms in 1994, the primary voice heard from Japanese Canadians was that of the people interned during World War II. Hiromi Goto examines the immigration experience of the Japanese Canadian beyond war and into present day Alberta. Celebrating cultural differences as a privilege, Chorus of Mushrooms explores the shifts and collisions of culture through the lives of three generations of women in a Japanese family living in a small prairie town.

In the late nineteenth century white settlers and administrators arrive to occupy the African country of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). Nehanda, a village girl, is recognized through omens and portents as a saviour. The resulting uprising by the Africans is brutally crushed but looks forward to the war of independence that succeeded a century later. Told in lucid, poetic prose, this is a gripping story about the first meeting of a people with their colonizer.

Ito Baraka is going to die. In Gatineau, far from the sun, in a dark, shabby flat he shares with his Native girlfriend, Kimi. But before he can die, he has a book to finish, in which he recounts events in a country where the suns burns, burns the skin, burns the brain, burns the retina of those forced to look at it without blinking. A country where another sun blazes: a dictator in the grips of fear. Is magic not the most dangerous form of subversion? Ito makes the acquaintance of blind Koli Lem.