National Network for Equitable Library Service

Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed.

"The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan''s long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary "Mouse" Bradford. Mouse''s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father -- the admired country doctor -- is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.

A collection of stories that seeks to examine the dark side of ordinary people.

English novelist Guy Boyd's publisher forces him, against his inclination, to write a biography of the late Gabriel Brown, an eminent dealer in Old Masters. From the start, the project rattles the young Englishman, who has little interest in the Canadian-born connoisseur. As he settles into living in the dead man's house, interviewing his friends and lovers, Guy becomes fascinated with the process of life writing. He even travels to Canada to research the existence of a man who determinedly left no clues behind.

On a three-tiered stage in the Ontario countryside, the mellifluous voice of an auctioneer can induce grizzled farmers to buy broken shovels. His two sons help out with the business, but it's his strangely mute young daughter who seduces auction-goers with her elaborate vintage costumes. When she disappears, the younger brother - now a Montreal film professor - begins a lifelong search that ultimately leads him to the silent, experimental cinema of Molly O.

Searching for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend in contemporary Japan, the protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread, colliding with call girls, playing chaperone to a teenage psychic, and receiving cryptic instructions from a shabby oracle.

Peregrine Long sees a Chinese family on board a ship--in his morning tea. The image inspires him to write the story of this family, but then a woman claims that he's writing her family history exactly as it happened. She has just one question: What happened to her long-lost uncle?

On Whidbey Island, the Gray quintuplets are the stuff of legend. Pixie and her brothers have always been bigger and blonder than their neighbors, as if they were birthed from the island itself. Together, they serve as an unofficial search-and-rescue team for the island, saving tourists and locals alike from the forces of wind and sea. But, when a young boy goes missing, the mysteries start to pile up. While searching for him, they find his mother's dead body instead, and realize that something sinister is in their midst.

Cat Mateo, a once-stray teenager, owes her rescue to Detective Stride. But Cat holds something else to her chest: a secret, the sheer power of which she could not possibly comprehend. A secret that, once out of the bag, will viciously scratch at Duluth's still-healing wounds.

A goodhearted priest and scholar, a professor with a passion for the darker side of medieval psychology, a defrocked monk, and a rich young businessman are all helplessly beguiled by the same coed.