National Network for Equitable Library Service

Terrified of being targeted by bullies for being overweight, Lionel tries to go through grade 8 attracting as little notice as possible. But Lionel discovers something about himself: he's fast. And Lionel takes up running. That leads to joining a running group, and being recruited for the school track team. But being on the track team and getting more attention brings him closer to the bullies he's been avoiding - and makes him a target.

This much-anticipated second collection of short stories by Carol Windley captures the shimmering, mutable light of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island, where a diverse and unforgettable group of characters confront sorrows and triumphs.

Celia's vision of the past during a weather disturbance becomes a reality when her great-niece is horribly abused.

Friends since attending university in Jamacia, Lethe and Daniel have long realized they would never be good for each other. But Lethe is Daniel's muse, and theirs is a connection that proves unbreakable as they spend the next thirty years crisscrossing the Caribbean and travelling the world in search of love, work, and home. Now, Daniel has become an internationally renowned prize-winning poet, and Lethe aspires to be a writer in her own right.

Marianne, a young Montrealer, has come to live in Tuscany to draw and write and examine her life. Here she meets Marco, a temptingly seductive man who still lives in his mother’s house in the village and who’s not prepared to commit himself to anything resembling a shared life. Though he breaks her heart, again and again, Marianne can only avoid him by returning to Canada. This first novel by Pascale Quiviger is marked by its luminous language and its unstinting look at what makes Marianne, and Marco, and, indeed, an entire village and the world beyond it, tick.

The people in gay bars on Christmas Day are so desperate for basic human contact that they'd go home with a Doc Marten shoe if it made a move, and maybe even if it didn't. So begins the story of Cameron Dodds, a disenfranchised writer who visits gay bars on Christmas and works at a Salvation Army Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in order to steal the stories of the people he meets there. But when Cameron finds a patient hanged in the utilities closet, his infatuation with other people's stories becomes an obsession.

The pain tree tells stories that speak to all aspects of Jamaican life.

Set in Quebec at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, The Heart Specialist is the epic story of Agnes White, a lonely orphaned girl fascinated by the "wrong" things—microscopes, dissections, and anatomy instead of more ladylike interests—who rises to the status of one of the world's most celebrated pioneering women doctors. Not only does she break through patriarchal academic barriers; she masters the science of the human heart, becoming a scholar of international fame, all in a place and time inimical to intelligent women.

A story of sorrow and renewal which revolves around the caleche drivers of Old Montreal.

Newcomer Kammie Summers has fallen into a well during a (fake) initiation into a club whose members have no intention of letting her join. Now Kammie's trapped in the dark, growing increasingly claustrophobic, and waiting to be rescued-- or possibly not. As hours pass, the reality of Kammie's predicament mixes with her memories of the highlights and lowlights of her life so far, including the reasons her family moved to this new town in the first place.