National Network for Equitable Library Service

A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy and its challenging aftermath; a troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her; a young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone, as they navigate the triangle of responsibilities between motherhood, work, and love.

Swing in the House paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racism to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a deftly-constructed morality play. In the novella-length title story, a young mother timidly explores the possibilities of an affair to alleviate the suffocation of a loveless marriage, to detrimental effect.

Winner, 2015 Archambault Prize The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, drugs, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries a PCP variant called mesc for the first time, her budding rebellion begins to spiral out of control.

Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal.

A Ty Davis Mystery. A bloody battle between rival motorcycle gangs leads television reporter Ty Davis into yet another dangerous encounter with a big-city’s underworld. His on the scene account of the violence, for CKCF Television’s “Flash News,” draws Davis and his colleagues into a complex web of drug-smuggling and murder. Turf wars pit local criminal bikers against each other, even as the American-based Hells Angels threaten to establish an unprecedented foothold in Canada. Law enforcement agencies in both countries deal with a deadly alliance between two, powerful mafia families.

Set in Montreal, New Tab spans a year in the life of a twenty-six year old videogame designer as he attempts to reset his life, in the process chronicling with humor disillusion, boredom, self-destruction, Facebook chats, Concordia University, bilingualism, good parties, bad parties, a backyard cinema, social anxiety and running a possibly illegal DIY venue. Written in a simple yet bold and astonishing style, New Tab is a profoundly intimate tale of self-reinvention and ambiguous relationships. A sharp, funny, modern novel from one of the most unique new writers in Canada.

Wanted: One man of average height, well-muscled but not ironclad, neither overly or underly handsome, with more body hair than a baby's behind but less than a gorilla, hefty penis, charge not too easily discharged, good mind, good sense of humour and humouring, joyful spirit, for a relationship of indeterminate time with a recently divorced woman who misses it.

Birth, death and all the big moments in between. Shortlisted for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award These stories about artists, lovers, brothers and strangers acutely probe love and loss, men and women together, and the family ties that bind. A father renews an old artistic rivalry with his dying son; a raucous family gathering ends in tragedy; a quick stop to pick up a hitchhiker begins a chain of events that changes a man’s life. Griffin covers birth, death and all the big moments in between.

The Love Monster is the tall tale of one woman’s struggle with mid-life issues. The main character, Margaret H. Atwood, has psoriasis, a boring job and a bad attitude. Her cheating husband has left her. And none of her pants fit any more. Marston takes the reader on a hilarious journey of recovery. Hope comes in the form of a dope-smoking senior citizen, a religious fanatic, a good lawyer and a talking turtle (not to mention Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Warren Zevon, Neil Armstrong and a yogi buried deep underground).

Literary agent Madison Holmes is brutally attacked in her condo and left for dead, days after she sent rejection letters to four would-be authors. Lieutenant-Detective Toni Damiano catches this high profile case to the chagrin of the detectives in her division.Unfazed and confident, Damiano is determined to track down the vicious assailant and close her first “lead” case. Seven hours in, she has the murder weapon – a boxed manuscript. “All this over a book?”