National Network for Equitable Library Service

Migration stories are an essential component of Canada's historical/literary continuum; we need to know of such writings to rationalize about who Canadians really are, and where they are from. Aren't we all the children of migration? Where we came from, how we got here, who we were, and are, and who may become in time … such themes should interest all those naturally concerned about identity and origin; that eternal enigma wrought of migration. These short-fiction stories tell much about migration and Canada, in ways that are funny, ribald, tragic or contemplative, but never dull.

We all know adults who are stranded in the amber of adolescence. Growing older but not necessarily growing up is the central theme of Middle-Aged Boys & Girls, featuring characters who, to varying degrees, are stuck in adolescent roles of rebel, outcast, enfant terrible and cool kid. All are linked by losses--of looks, of status, of job security, of health, of confidence--which forces them to life's inevitable turning point.

The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants -- spirited people prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands in pursuit of dreams of a better life. But often times there's a reality check, and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges: cultural shock, lack of Canadian work experience and jobs, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Despite this, the stories show the determination of these immigrants to survive on alien soil.

Daniel, a young French-Vietnamese man, lies dying in a Montreal hospital. Spurned by his family for contracting AIDS in Provincetown, Daniel spends his last months in despair. Only his cousin Mai stays by his side to record the darkest of family secrets. From French Indochina to present day North America, this novel follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they endure their own folly and the whims of history.

A novel about passions -- a passion for sex, a passion for America, and a passion for movie-making. Sarah Fielding wants to turn the great Canadian novel into a ‘quality' movie, but the sex-mad producer, the deluded Hollywood star, and the ‘authentic' young actor have their own thoughts about how it should unfold. Will Sarah triumph? Not likely.

The characters in Holy Fools + 2 Stories are humble people who may seem mad. Burdened by delusion. Driven by irrational goals. They take action and are caught up in the web of events, carried to unfamiliar shores that may or may not denote salvation. There is no message. I just wanted to write about the dear human spirit, swimming against a crazy world.

Stone Woman is a saga of Blossom's unconventional family of five women, whose lives are bound by a Vietnam-War draft dodger David, immersed in the Yorkville subculture of the hippie daze of Toronto. The novel draws the reader into a web of liaisons -- into David's love affair with Blossom's mother Liza, his covert dealings with her friend Anna, as well as the mysterious Helena.

No Safeguards, the first in a trilogy, follows Jay and his brother Paul from childhood to young adulthood. We witness the destructive impact of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on their mother and father, opposition to those beliefs by the boys' grandmother and each boy's very different response to their parents' religiosity. This becomes even more poignant after they leave their grandmother's comfortable home in St. Vincent to join their mother in Montreal.

Expulsion & Other Stories consists of two parts: a novella followed by a group of short stories. But the main protagonists have one thing in common: they are all women coming of age in difficult times. In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship's mundane face -- a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play -- or pays the price, that of facing “expulsion”.

Beginning with seductive thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped from the mind of the protagonist who returns and sees his old hometown as it once was. Additionally, there is the suffering caused by migration.