National Network for Equitable Library Service

Half Moon, a hauntingly beautiful saga set in Paris, New York, and Atlantic Canada, explores themes of passion, betrayal, art, and redemption in the story of an elusively beautiful woman and the world-class painter obsessed with creating her portrait.

The heart and spirit of an indomitable people travel far in time and space … The unexpected luxury of a day spent at the home of a Hollywood star leads three old friends to share secret facets of their lives, both tragic and triumphant. Excited to retu to the home of her youth after a lifetime spent away, a woman lea s that the life of a childhood friend has been a bleak, awful shadow of her own. The streets of Vancouver seem to glitter with promises of love and success, but a young man is forced to perceive the grittier reality that hides beneath.

Is it okay to tell a lie? Lisa Simms thinks so. Lisa leaves her small town and moves to the big city to find work and her letters home tell of an ordered life and success at work. The reality, however, is rather different. From crazy days at work, to disappointing love affairs, from dealing with death to discovering love, Lisa takes the reader on a ride of laughter and tears as the fiction of each letter dissolves into the roller coaster of life.

This Ramshackle Tabernacle is a collection of short stories set in and around the fictional villages of St. Lola and St. Olga in northeastern Ontario. Whether reflecting on the broken lives of others in the community or mourning the death of a friend who drowned in a freak fishing accident, the characters in this collection face tragedy with grace, humour and perseverance.

These stories deal with both the rundown and ruined aspects of our humanity but also with the redeeming and renewing love that can hold a community together when tragedies threaten to make it crumble.

In the 1920s, Jim, Bert and Rose Evans all move from Newfoundland to Brooklyn, New York, in search of work and a better life, leaving their sister Annie back home in St. John’s. By the Rivers of Brooklyn traces the story of the Evans family across two countries and three generations, exploring the hopes, passions and heartbreaks of those who went away and those who stayed behind.

Prissy Montgomery goes to great lengths to avoid having sex with her husband, Howie. So when he confesses to having an affair, and requests a divorce, she shouldn’t be all that surprised. With her fourteen-year-old son in tow she leaves the comfort of her Toronto home and heads back to Paradise Bay, her childhood home in Newfoundland. But Prissy’s mother, in an effort to spare her daughter humiliation, takes out an obituary to announce Howie’s untimely demise. Prissy is horrified by the deception, especially when her childhood friend becomes widowed for real.

The Mean Time is a work of literary fiction set in Corner Brook about how people allow their pasts to shape and define them – in holding on to dread, regret, and pain. The death of Will Johnston shakes the community to its foundations, and Frank Doyle’s marriage is frayed by his involvement in the death. Torn by guilt and unable to let go, Frank descends into alcoholism until his wife eventually leaves with their child in the hopes that he will come to terms with the past. Bobby Johnston spent most of his adulthood running from life and bad decisions.

When a devastating fire sweeps through St. John's, Newfoundland, in the summer of 1892, nineteen-year-old Lily Hunt hopes it's the beginning of a new life that will transform her from a dutiful daughter to a crusader, a suffragist, and a woman in love. Twenty years later, Lily's daughter Grace is deeply immersed in campaigning for women to have the vote. When Grace learns of her mother's involvement in the suffrage cause, the Lily she discovers bears little resemblance to the mother who raised her. Grace sets out on a quest to discover what changed Lily, and why she wants to hide her past.

A novel of remarkable historical breadth, Found Far and Wide follows Sam Kennedy through the tragedy of the Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914, the horrors of The First World War, and the dangers of rum-running in Prohibition-era New York. And as Sam journeys through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, carrying the ghosts of those he’s lost, he clings to his love for a woman he’s only ever seen in a photograph.

In The End of Music, Jamie Fitzpatrick’s two mesmerizing, interwoven narratives circle the lives of Joyce, a modern young woman navigating the fraught social mores of a small town in its post-war heyday, and her son, Carter, more than fifty years later, whose days as an aspiring rock star are over. As Joyce’s memories of the past begin to escape her, her son’s past returns to haunt him. Brilliantly and unflinchingly revealing the inner lives of his characters, Fitzpatrick offers an extraordinary novel, with two startling twists, about women, men, and reckoning with the past.