National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Gabriel Rivages recounts the life of Olympic gold medallist and silver-screen heart-throb Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), he brings to life a vibrant patchwork of America's 20th-century, from its athletic exploits to its literary underground, from its cinematic glory to its obscure failures.

Shifting across three countries, The Deserters explores themes of trust, isolation, abandonment, and emotional disconnection in a world dramatically altered by the experience of war. Eugenie is trying-and mostly failing-to restore an inherited old farm in New Brunswick while her husband, a master carpenter, is away in Spain. The work involved overwhelms her, so she hires Dean to help bring the farm back to working order.

In Apple S, the kaleidoscopic worldview of celebrated Québécois novelist Éric Plamondon sets its sights on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the seeds of Silicon Valley. Concluding a wide-lens journey through the American West that began with Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016) and continued with counter-culture poet Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018), the final installment of the 1984 Trilogy delivers a heart-rending meta-biography of a technological mastermind.

Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan is the author of ten mystery novels, most recently In the Shadows (Véhicule, 2017). Mystery taking place in Montreal.

A coming of age story taking place in Montreal.

Writer Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s. In Mayonnaise, the second novel of Éric Plamondon's 1984 Trilogy, narrator Gabriel Rivages pieces together Brautigan's life starting in Oregon, where he was born, to San Francisco, where he became a poet and satirical novelist, and on to the Bolinas, California, where he committed suicide in 1984. Sifting through the ruins of Sixties idealism, Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism.

Dominoes at the Crossroads maps an alternate Canada—one crisscrossed by a Caribbean diaspora seeking futures, portals to the past, and music. In this collection of stories, Kaie Kellough's characters navigate race, history, and coming of age by way of their confessions and dreams.

During the Quiet Revolution of the Sixties, in Nun's Island, a suburb of Montreal, Bérénice Einberg and her brother Christian have been since childhood at the heart of the acrimonious marital conflict of their parents. Bérénice, a precocious child, given to fantasy and word games, is surprisingly articulate. It's agreed that she will be educated in the Jewish faith, and Christian in the Catholic religion. But each parent uses the children to hurt the other. As a kind of counter-attack, Bérénice decides to love Christian unconditionally.

Cosmopolitan and curious seventeen-year-old Chrysler Wong suffers from debilitating fear brought on by belief in a family curse, whereby she and her siblings will each die at age eighteen when they leave their small hometown. Three siblings have already died; the fourth, her favourite, has left town and is incommunicado. Through the course of a narrative that is offbeat, funny, and full of verve, we meet Chrysler's siblings, a lively bunch with a fun dynamic and interesting back-stories of their own.

You will never know what really happened to Lech or any of us. We mean nothing by it, darling. It is a silent agreement we all have with ourselves, that nothing will ever make us prisoners again, not even memory.'#x9D; Set primarily in the neighbourhood of fictional Copernicus Avenue, Andrew Borkowski's debut collection of short stories is a daring, modern take on life in Toronto's Polish community in the years following World War II.