National Network for Equitable Library Service

This collection of short stories is based on traditional values important to us all—respect, cooperation and kindness. Robert James Challenger's illustrations and tales reveal a world of magical birds, fish and other wildlife, who teach readers lessons about life and the world. Seal shows us why we should not let fear of failing stop us from trying new things. Hummingbird helps us appreciate the beauty in our world. Kingfisher teaches us how to believe in ourselves. Coho learns the rewards of not giving up.

Today, many of the historic coal-mining communities of the Rocky Mountains are uninhabited ghost towns. Yet behind the crumbled ruins are tales of perseverance, danger and romance. A devastating mine explosion on Halloween shatters the lives of mining families in Nordegg. The miners of Mountain Park build a hockey rink still celebrated in local lore. A young immigrant couple in Mercoal establishes a successful business only to have their love story sadly cut short. These 11 dramatic and poignant ghost-town tales are sure to fascinate all who love pioneer history.

A fun-for-all-ages collection of over thirty spooky stories in settings across Western Canada. When friends and family gather around a campfire, good times and scary stories are sure to follow. In Campfire Stories of Western Canada, Barbara Smith, the author of twenty books of true ghost stories from across Canada, presents a creepy collection of tales tailor-made for your family’s next foray into the British Columbia or Alberta wilderness. Suitable for campers aged eight to eighty, these tales combine truth and local legend with truly bone-chilling results.

Seven novels of adventure in one ebook bundle. When David McLean, well-loved grandfather and avid adventurer, dies, he leaves behind an unusual will that outlines sevens tasks he has set for his seven grandsons. Eric Walters, John Wilson, Ted Staunton, Richard Scrimger, Norah McClintock, Sigmund Brouwer and Shane Peacock bring their signature writing styles to a series of adventures that take readers from the top of Kilimanjaro to the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer’s stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the “moods taking over”. This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literary and emotional life through published and unpublished stories of an idyllic Montreal Jewish childhood contrasted with deeply troubled and often shocking diary entries that document the author’s lifelong battle with mental illness.

Taking its title from a story in the collection, this anthology brings together the best prose writing in Quebec—all short pieces—from the winners and finalists of the last three years of the Quebec Writing Competition. Montreal’s CBC Radio and the Quebec Writers’ Federation created the competition in 1999 which resulted in four previous anthologies: Telling Stories, Short Stuff, In Other Words, and Minority Reports. The winning stories are broadcast on CBC Radio and published in Maisonneuve magazine.

Short story writer, novelist and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the prestigious 2013 Man Booker International prize. In Ex-Yu, he explores the major themes of war and exile, of religiosity and existentialism, that have defined his fiction and earned him a place among the pantheon of international writers addressing contemporary literature’s most pressing questions.

A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy and its challenging aftermath; a troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her; a young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone, as they navigate the triangle of responsibilities between motherhood, work, and love.

Swing in the House paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racism to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a deftly-constructed morality play. In the novella-length title story, a young mother timidly explores the possibilities of an affair to alleviate the suffocation of a loveless marriage, to detrimental effect.

The women in the stories in Out of Cleveland face their challenges with an uncommon blend of intelligence, scepticism, and hope. Each story shows the entanglement of cause and effect, creating a memorable collection of unique voices. In "Ninety East" a truck driver and a woman in a Mustang perform an unlikely romantic duet in stream of consciousness as she follows him through a snowstorm from Cleveland to Buffalo. "Poison" is less a whodunit than a was-anything-done: after a woman takes in an inscrutable foreign researcher as a boarder, she suspects the worst.