National Network for Equitable Library Service

The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They're peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people's extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone.

Ashley Drummond is an elite swimmer. Clayton Sandalford is a talented artist. From the  moment of their first meeting, they were destined to be together. Staying together, however, will test the limits of their love. A world-record swim, and the strange vision that accompanies it, raises questions about the couple's connection. Then a life-altering incident triggers a mystical change, which will demand that both of them let go in ways never imagined.

In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province's most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound.

Born to privilege and wed to her high school sweetheart Veer, a free spirited Maya feels trapped in a conventional upper class family with patriarchal expectations in India. Claustrophobic within the dark walls of the mansion she lives in with her spouse, Maya starts living precariously through the threads of her curiosity.

What will endure...love, revenge, or Archibald? It's the summer of 1990 in West Vancouver. Maggie, a 23-year-old nursing school drop-out, has just started a job as a live-in personal assistant to Archibald, a flamboyant, elderly novelist with a quick wit, sharp tongue, and a penchant for nasty practical jokes. In between picking up his medications and groceries, Maggie desperately tries to hold the unravelling threads of her life together.

In Fate's Instruments, picking up the story from where Paul's brother Jay left it in No Safeguards, Paul, an aspiring writer, marries Carlos, with whom he lived in Guatemala, and brings him to Montreal. Things go wrong from the beginning, and they break up. Then fate, in the form of a brain tumour, strikes Paul. He receives support from Jay, Lionel (himself a brain tumour survivor), friends, and the enigmatic Professor Bram. But it is Paul's exploration of his Vincentian childhood and new-found love that restores his equilibrium.

Meet Daniel Garneau, your average gay hockey player from small-town Ontario. After moving to Toronto to attend university, Daniel meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance artist whose grandfather was a book-burning Nazi. A Boy at the Edge of the World is a rollicking dramedy that explores the compulsive and (ultimately) universal human pursuit of intimacy, sex, and love.

A story about life lived and lost, and what two teens hold onto in the wake of a tragic plane crash, told in a unique voice and style that puts readers directly inside the heroine's mind. Can you want something-or someone-so badly that it changes your destiny' Elyse Schmidt never would have thought so, until it happened to her. When Elyse and her not-so-secret crush, Josh Harris, are the sole survivors of a plane crash, tragedy binds them together. It's as if their love story is meant to be.

For every reader who grew up loving R.J. Palacio's Wonder comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and magical YA debut about what it means to accept the body you're given. Morgan was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. At sixteen she's tired of keeping her physical abnormality a secret. One night, after a lifetime of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first she feels liberated. But the fallout is more than she bargained for.

They inherited ultimate power ... Heir to the infamous DeLuca drug cartel fortune, Angel DeLuca walked away from it all for a normal life-until a wrenching betrayal shattered his belief in anything but saving his family's hard-won legacy. He's come back to lead the DeLuca empire-no matter the cost. But his most dangerous rival is the one woman whose fierce determination he can't resist ... How far will they go to keep it' Emilia East grew up in the game-virtually a daughter to Angel's mother.