National Network for Equitable Library Service

Firefly lived in the park across from her mother’s home. It was safer there. But after the bad night happens, and her baseball-bat-wielding mother is taken away, social services sends Firefly to live with her Aunt Gayle. She hardly knows Gayle, but discovers that she owns a costume shop.
Yes, Firefly might be suffering from PTSD, but she can get used to taking baths, sleeping on a bed again, and wearing as many costumes as she can to school.
But where is “home”? What is “family”? Who is Firefly, for that matter … and which costume is the real one?

Paul Prescot’s desire to catalogue and comprehend the aboriginal rock paintings of the Canadian Shield is told through the eyes of the woman he loves, and who, for her own reasons, accompanies him on his travels to the deep north. Her journeys with her husband, and then alone, returning to the north shore of Lake Superior to commend his ashes to the water, draw her deeper into a history that, while foreign to them both, seems to offer a meaningful alternative to a world that has gone wrong.

Charlotte’s boss at T. Gilmore and Associates takes off on a mysterious trip to Europe, leaving Charlotte in charge of the detective agency. Mrs. Jessop hires the newly promoted Private Investigator to inquire into the untimely death of her son, a veteran injured in the Great War. The police ruled it a suicide, but Mrs. Jessop doesn’t agree and wants Charlotte to find out what really happened.

Timothy Heppner is a frustrated ghostwriter struggling to make ends meet in Edenfeld, a small Mennonite community bulldozing its way towards modernity--if it's old, it has to go! A member of the Preservation Society but desperate to keep his job with the mayor's Parks and "Wreck" department, Timothy finds himself in an awkward position when he is hired to write an updated version of the town's history book.

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

Margaret Atwood's dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, has become a modern classic;and now she brings the iconic story to a dramatic conclusion in this riveting sequel. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order.

Awkward Pause is an anthology collection from Ryan Harby's popular online comic series Honey Dill. A love letter to odd humour, Awkward Pause is a mix of joy and sorrow, both soft and sharp. The book includes over 50 comic strips, which range in topic from mental health to time travel, murder, and butts. Absurd and strange in ways that will warm even the coldest of hearts.

What haunts our hearts today may haunt us in the hereafter . . . In future-Edo Japan, two lovers cross paths after fifty years apart. A drone-stream influencer is stalked by a spectre her online audience can't see. Trans vampires' lives intertwine in cyber-goth Paris. A non-binary chaplain serving a haunted space station becomes enamoured with the ship's AI. And the treachery and passion of a gestalt alien mind reaches critical mass for the explorer who discovered it.

Collecting the latest and funniest of Bogart Creek, Derek Evernden's laugh out loud funny, single-panel comics of absurd and dark humour. If life scares the hell out of you one minute and cracks you up the next, you'll feel right at home in Bogart Creek.

Marcus, a young boy who feels second best at school, suffers a serious brain injury as a side effect of a virus. In hospital, and with fellow patient Emily's help, Marcus learns to embrace who he really is as he finds ways to cope with his condition. Semi-autobiographical story, from author Mandi Kujawa, beautifully illustrated in a familiar style which will make middle-grade readers feel at ease.