National Network for Equitable Library Service

Eleven-year-old Maya Devine has grown up with a warped view of reality. For one, she sees colour around people’s bodies and can sometimes hear what’s going on inside their heads. These insights make everyone a bit more interesting, but the one person she’ll never figure out is her mother. Marigold has never been like other moms, but still, Maya sometimes feels like she is all she has.

What do you get when you cross the Virgin Mary with Brooke Shields, add a trash-talking beauty queen wannabe and throw in a couple of talking nipples? One of the most laugh-out-loud books you'll read all year. Peter Paddington is 13, overweight, the subject of his classmates' ridicule, and the victim of too many bad movie-of-the-week storylines. When Peter's nipples begin speaking to him one day and inform him of their diabolical plan to expose his secret desires to the world, Peter finds himself cornered in a world that seems to have no tolerance for difference.

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank's life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she's always known in a whole new way, with hidden pain and anguish lurking behind familiar faces, and violence forever threatening to burst forth, like brushfire smouldering and dormant under the muskeg. With her first novel, Lisa Guenther lays bare familial bonds, secret histories and the healing potential of art.

The Deal: Jake Morgan, ex-cop, gambler, and casino dealer, reluctantly agrees to keep an eye on his boss’s great-niece during her visit to Vegas.

When someone keeps trying to accost them and the bruises escalate with each encounter, Jake realizes that it isn’t a simple case of mistaken identity. To make things worse, his precocious Britney look-a-like charge has a crush on him, leaving Jake in a quandary as he tries to unravel a mystery that began fifty years earlier . . .

A nuanced story about artificial intelligence and digital immortality, Freenet plunges readers into the far future, when humans have closed distances in time and space through wormhole tunnels between interplanetary colonies. Consciousness has been digitized and cybersouls uploaded to a near-omniscient data matrix in a world where information is currency and the truth belongs to whoever has the greatest bandwidth. When Simara Ying crash-lands on the desert planet Bali, she finds herself trapped in a cave-dwelling culture with no social network for support.

A hilarious coming-of-age novel about the pain of young love, family secrets, and sick ferrets

Fifteen-year-old Jacob feels almost on the inside: almost smart, almost funny, almost good-looking, almost worthy of falling in love. His sister is too busy dating guys in Whitesnake jackets to notice, and his best friend is occupied with his own painful pubescent crisis. Jacob’s mother has just started a curious (and rather un-Christian) holy war with the church across the street, while his father has secretly moved into the garage.

The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.

Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.

“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.

The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”

"I wonder," said Hermes, "what it would be like if animals had human intelligence." "I'll wager a year's servitude," answered Apollo, "that animals — any animal you like — would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence."

The joke? Toronto thinks it’s the centre of some multicultural universe, always bragging about how people come from every part of the world to live there. The punch line? Some of them are coming to commit crimes.

So yeah, Sharon MacDonald’s got a problem — Ray; he’s too good-looking. But she knows what everybody knows. The whole world might be coming here, but this is nowhere.

For Charlie Hillier, a posting to Cuba could be the perfect place to start his new life ' if he survives it. With his career stalled and the office abuzz about his soon-to-be-ex-wife's indiscretions, Ottawa bureaucrat Charlie Hillier is desperate for a change. So when the chance at a posting to the Canadian embassy in Havana comes up, he jumps at it, grateful to get as far away as he can from his ex and his dead-end job at Foreign Affairs headquarters.