National Network for Equitable Library Service

Thirteen-year-old Harry Fieldstone and his friends start a Poets' Club at school, then Harry stumbles across a ring. He discovers the ring gives him different powers every day. Harry and the gang learn that the ring can be traced to ancient Rome. Now a centuries-old organization known as the Toga Gang is determined to take the ring for themselves.

The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed. A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees' crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the auto show.

When Jacob is called back to Advocate, he is not only returning home again, something he knows he cannot really do; he is going to face his dying grandmother and the people of the town who turned on one of their own. Twenty years earlier, when his uncle David came home, it was to die. The response in Advocate was typical of most towns, large and small, in 1984: when his disease became known, Jacob, his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt, were shunned, turned out from school and their jobs, out of fear of an until-then unknown virus.

After her father disappears on Crystal Night, fifteen-year-old Freda, her mother and Freda's younger sister flee Germany for the -safe haven- of Shanghai. But the safe haven becomes anything but safe when Freda's mother abandons her children. Forced to become an adult before her time, Freda finds strength, work and new friends. She also joins the Junior Jewish Resistance, a small group of young people determined to show their defiance toward Japanese and Nazi soldiers, who are too close for comfort in their new home.

At a side-of-the-highway diner on a mountain pass, during one extraordinary, windy day in 1977, the paths of an odd assortment of travellers cross. The stories of each circle around points of departure: what sets one on one's journey. These seemingly unconnected-but oddly interconnected-stories involve strange twists, turns and the kinds of chance encounters that change the way we see the world.

The latest installment in Dave Hugelschaffer's innovative murder-mystery series sends forest fire forensics expert Porter Cassel to the isolated northern Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan, where an arsonist armed with Molotov cocktails has started a series of blazes. During his investigation the remains of a trapper are discovered in a burned-down cabin. The RCMP rule the death accidental, but Cassel isn't so sure. Complicating matters are unfriendly locals who don't take kindly to outsiders prying into their business.

Caught in a net of her own lies

"The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan''s long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary "Mouse" Bradford. Mouse''s world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father -- the admired country doctor -- is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.

Bujumbura, Burundi is one of the last places you would expect to find Thomas Brossard. Once a powerful cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government, Thomas never had a particular interest in the continent of Africa and the concerns it represented. That was his wife Louise’s domain. But, after an embarrassing election loss, Thomas will do just about anything to regain political power and improve his wife’s estimation of him.

The Vanishing Man is a collection of linked short stories about a man trying to come to terms with his past, a religious upbringing, in an ever-changing personal world that constantly throws him into self-doubt. He marries, finds happiness, only to go through a terrible divorce. He recovers, finds true love, marries, and goes through another terrible divorce and family death. He goes into therapy and tries to make sense of his failures and unhappiness by attempting to reclaim his past life. But this only partly succeeds.