National Network for Equitable Library Service

Eduardo, an architect from Lisbon, has come to Montreal to be with his wife Geneviève. Geneviève researches fungi and likes to catalogue her orgasms. But when Eduardo is caught in an explosion and rumors of arson begin to circulate, both his marriage and his fledgling architecture firm verge on collapse. Gorgeous, colourful, and richly described, Backspring is a sensual taxonomy of desire.

Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality'and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.

In a linked collection that presents the secret small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints delves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by an affair she cannot end; a receptionist, and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce.

These fourteen stories by acclaimed poet Patricia Young explore the small victories and lurching disappointments, losses and betrayals of the everyday with a language and style that is tautly poetic and beautifully unsentimental. A woman who cannot leave her house loses almost everything, her only companion a garrulous radio talk show host; a house fire sets in motion the end of a marriage as a couple re-examine the meaning of truth and commitment; a teenage girl cannot extract herself from a doomed relationship with a heroin addict.

Prompted by a mysterious summons from his past, a man known only as 'The Super' begins an investigation into maternal neglect by a privileged Toronto family. As the case deepens, revealing a web of systemic crime and depravity, The Super undertakes a series of adjustments: his word for the personal interventions that he conducts on behalf of the powerless. These increasingly chaotic retributions soon pull him into a spiral of brutal violence. Working within six-to-eight week windows of hyper-time periods of near-sleepless activity and hyper-awareness that precede his own mental collapse.

It's 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small town of Chatham with his father and older sister. So far, so normal. But Tom's dad is the local tattoo artist, his older sister might be in love with the new girl in town, and his Mom ran off and shacked up with pastor Bob who runs a Christian evangelical sect. And no one looks at Tom the same since he was brought back from the dead that time when he was eight. Tom delivers the Chatham Daily News, and he can give you all the news that's fit to print about the folks around here.

Jerry McKenzie is a reclusive and antisocial artist, quite content to ride his horses and work in his studio, keeping to himself. It's not any kind of life for a child, and when Jerry finds out he’s been named his orphaned nephew’s guardian, he panics. He doesn't know what to do with a child and isn't sure he can give William the affection and the love the boy so desperately needs.

Sequel to Good to Know It's been almost a year since William lost his parents and left the only life he knew for a new home in Canada. But now there's nothing William loves more than being with his two new dads. His uncle Jerry McKenzie adopted him and then married David Loewenberger, and William is learning what it means to be part of a family. But despite all the love and care the two men lavish on him, William is still lonely.

Quinn Donahue will do anyone once, so when Aaron Miller spots Quinn making his moves in a Vancouver gay bar, Aaron thinks he's found just the guy to relieve him of his unwanted virginity. Quinn, however, has apparently decided to make an exception to his usual open-bed policy. He may be an unrepentant connoisseur of one-night stands, but he's not going to disappoint a sweet kid like Aaron by giving him a hot night and then leaving while the sheets are still warm.