National Network for Equitable Library Service

A propulsive literary page-turner about a family torn apart by a mother's obsession with a sound that no one else can hear One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire's life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship.

To the outside world, Roxanne seems terribly lonely: her husband Earl has passed away, and her daughter Linda was murdered. What people don't understand is that Earl and Linda are still keeping Roxanne company, reincarnated in the forms of a wiener dog and standard poodle. But this relationship—not idyllic, it's true, but at least relatively harmonious—is disrupted when Roxanne accidentally hits a pit bull with her car. On the precipice of having the dog put down, she recognizes the eyes of her daughter's killer, Helmut. Should she choose retribution, or forgiveness?

Book your ticket now for a trip to the future, the past, and the timeslips in between. Through the eloquent prose and imaginings of eighteen tellers of tales, we are pleased to present to you a collection of stories-on-a-train that will transport you to tantalizing worlds that you simply cannot imagine.

There is nothing new in the world except the history we do not know. Alchemy and Artifacts (Tesseracts Twenty-Two) is a collection of twenty-three amazing stories based on historical artifacts combined with fantastic historical fiction. The stories meld culture, concept and incident into a rich collection of 'what if' speculations that provide warnings yet revel in the cultural celebrations we continue to observe today. They are the touchstones that resonate with all who listen to and learn from the past.

Curtis tells the story of his relationship with a blind Aunt whose lover, Phillip, a Vancouver artist, died in 1917. Reading aloud to her the diary Phillip kept for a few months before his death, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life--his desire to become a good artist and to find some kind of love in his own life. But, like Harriet, he is blind in some ways--especially to the attentions of a gay friend.

Janey doesn't want to spend the summer away from her friends in Toronto--and certainly not in Edmonton with the grandmother she hardly knows. But her parents will be away--her mother in Turkey designing housing for earthquake victims, her dad on business trips. Her first surprise is her feisty grandma, who meets her at the airport in her vintage Cadillac, Marilyn. The second comes when she visits the Fort Edmonton historic park and time travels to 1907. The third is learning the real reason she's in Edmonton.

Can 14-year-old Janey disentangle her time-hopping dilemma and save not just her own life, but the past lives of others, before it's too late? Rescue in the Rockies follows Janey as she is forced to spend the holidays with her grandma - and her grandma's new beau, Charlie, who has invited along his German grandson, Max - in Banff, Alberta.

In Snowton, Alberta, secrets flourish like the crocuses in spring. When Louise Till lets herself into a neighbor's home using a surreptitiously copied key, she discovers more than she ever wanted to know about her small town and herself. Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father's hardware store after her parents' unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers' keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn't.

From Dene artist and bioethicist Lisa Boivin comes this healing story of hope, dreams, and the special bond between grandfather and granddaughter. When a little girl dreams about a bear, her grandfather explains how we connect with the knowledge of our ancestors through dreams. Bear, Hawk, Caribou, and Wolf all have teachings to share to help us live a good life. But when Grampa gets sick and falls into a coma, the little girl must lean on his teachings as she learns to say goodbye.

The first erotic novel written by an Indigenous woman in French-available for the first time in English. In The Lover, the Lake, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau crafts a spellbinding, sensual love story, as a response to the stereotypical narrative portraying Indigenous peoples primarily as victims. In Bordeleau's tale, set before the arrival of residential schools in the community, Indigenous people are free to live and love joyously, wholeheartedly.