National Network for Equitable Library Service

Victorian Canada: Touring circuses, seances, and a world powered by steam engines. But in Belleville, Ontario, a twenty-eight-year old spinster, Lavender Fitch, barely scrapes by, selling flowers from her garden at the train station, her position in life greatly diminished after the death of her father, the local apothecary. Then, one day, a glamorous couple step off the train. The lady is a famed spirit medium, Allegra Trout, who has arrived for a public show of her mediumship, accompanied by her handsome but disfigured assistant, Robert.

Luka Dekker and her sister Connie are the inheritors of a secretive and disturbing family history going back three generations to the disappearance of their great-grandfather. Their troubled mother, Lark, also mysteriously disappeared; and their beloved grandmother, who raised the two girls, had a life haunted by a traumatic event that is only revealed after her death. The story unfolds against a backdrop of the drug-fueled Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the horrific pig farm murders, the seductive beauty of rural Saskatchewan, and the glittering lights of a famous prairie dance hall.

La vie est souvent ponctuée de départs. Que l'on vive en Europe, en Afrique ou en Amérique, nous devons tôt ou tard dire adieu ou voir des êtres chers partir sans crier gare. Départs s'attarde à huit destins, comme autant de voies qui divergent, permettant aux personnages de se réapproprier leur vie et de faire place au renouveau. Dans Départs, l'auteur lauréat David Baudemont explore avec beaucoup d'acuité les détails de la mobilité des êtres, dépeint les émotions et scrute les effets des séparations, qu'elles soient souhaitées ou imposées.

Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra's Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu Islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family-and her killer-alter in her absence.

Vancouver. A day like any other. Kyle, a successful cosmetic surgeon, is punishing himself with a sprint up a mountain. Charlotte, wife of a tech tycoon, is combing the farm belt for local cheese and a sense of purpose. Back in the city their families go about their business: landscaping, negotiating deals, skipping school. It's a day like any other-until suddenly it's not. When the earthquake hits, the city erupts in chaos and fear. Kyle's and Charlotte's families, along with two passersby, are thrown together in an oceanfront mansion.

Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis.

Wendy McGrath's The Santa Rosa Trilogy, a decade in the making, is finally available in a complete collection. Join a young Canadian girl in mid-century Edmonton, Alberta, as she seeks answers to life's questions and finds beauty in the mundane. Santa Rosa: What is real when seen through the eyes of a child? When does the harshness of reality transform idyllic memories?

Fifteen-year-old Gale is desperate to get out of Whitehorse, a fact that is immediately clear to counsellor Helen Cotillard when Gale walks into her office with her reluctant stepmother. It's 1995, and one counselling agency for kids and families serves all of the Yukon. Gale has been having anxiety attacks, the last one so severe it landed her in the hospital. Helen soon begins to realize that Gale's distress at being separated from her little sister Buddie too closely parallels a calamity from her own past.

Disgraced ex-cop Sloane Donovan has relied on her job as a fitness instructor to keep her mental illness and PTSD in check-until she finds a close friend dead, apparently by her own hand. Obsessive demons triggered and doubtful of the official narrative, she teams up with Wayne Capson, a PI willing to bend the law, to find out who really killed her friend. The search leads Sloane from Vancouver's wealthiest enclaves to the street's darkest corners, questioning millionaires, tennis instructors, sex workers, former police colleagues-anyone who might provide answers.

Immigration to Montreal. Young Senegalese coming to Quebec. A new world of contradictions and beauty. An epic contemporary vision of what it means to be uprooted, and what it takes to plant roots in a new land.