National Network for Equitable Library Service

Retired schoolteacher Flossy O’Reilly has spent almost all of her eight decades in the seaside community of Great Village, Nova Scotia. It is now a quiet Maritime village: where relationships between friends and family move at the pace of the tides; where there is no rush because, sooner or later, everyone finds out what they need to know with a trip to the general store. When Ruth, the teenaged granddaughter of an old friend, arrives from Ontario for a three-week stay, time suddenly catches up with Great Village.

When Mira Acharya's father dies, the challenges facing her Indo-Canadian family become that much more daunting. Ravi, her autistic older brother, requires special care but longs to be just like other children. Their mother must work full time to keep a roof over their heads and still make time to be a parent to an over-achiever and a developmentally challenged child. As much as Mira loves her mother and brother, she resents the situations in which living with them places her.

Fifteen-year-old Gemma's life on a small New Brunswick island with her father, Jonah, is not an exciting one. Her mother ran off when she was an infant, and Jonah, an amateur scientist, spends most of his time conducting experiments he thinks will one day bring him fame. But when a woman arrives on the island, Gemma tries to play matchmaker--only to discover Jonah's secret journals, which hold terrifying secrets about both their lives.

Susan Compo captures the lives of aspiring musicians, scenesters, and obsessive fans—lives in which reality is a constant threat to cherished illusions, and death, while never far away, is not always the end of the story.

Welcome to Montreal in the months before the 1995 referendum. Riot Girl gets bought out and mass marketed as the Spice Girls, and gays are gaining some legitimacy, but the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. It's been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; revolution seems possible, when you're 18, like Eve. Eve is pining to get out of her parents' house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back.

The Western Light, the prequel to the international bestselling The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan's long-awaited return to the life of the beloved narrator Mary "Mouse" Bradford. Mouse's world is constrained by a number of factors: her mother is dead, her father -- the admired country doctor -- is emotionally distant, her housekeeper Sal is prejudiced and narrow, and her grandmother and aunt, Big Louie and Little Louie, the only life-affirming presences in her life, live in another city.

Sons and Fathers is a novel about men. It tells the story of how three men use their talent to help and hurt each other - and compete with the accomplishments of their fathers.Three friends, three sons, each with a talent for words he learned from his father. Eli, Michael, and Allan were friends at McGill, and their lives continue to intersect as they make their ways in the shadow of the Peace Tower in Ottawa.

Abdallah's encounter with the military governor on the eve of his departure for America opens this collection of stories, and Khalil al-Ibrahami's moving search for his lost fiancée in Jerusalem closes the collection. In between, Issa J. Boullata's stories show what it's like to be an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt making a new life as an immigrant in Canada or the United States. This is what it is, to be displaced. This is what it is to leave your home and start over in a new country.

Fulvia, the Mafia Princess, must be a dutiful daughter or the family will be dishonoured. Though she eventually escapes and makes a new life in Canada, she is betrayed and then her husband is murdered on the Sicilian coast. The police Chief investigating the case is Marisa, who faces a station house of skeptical men as well as confronting Fulvia's uncle, the boss of bosses.

Xue Yiwei's life has been marked by that of the legendary Montreal surgeon Norman Bethune, who died in China in the cause of Communism. Like other Chinese of his generation - the generation that has turned China into the world power it is today - Xue Yiwei was inspired by Dr. Bethune's example during the Cultural Revolution. But unlike his peers, he went to the lengths of moving to Montreal, where he has lived for sixteen years as a writer acclaimed in China and - until now - unknown in Canada. This subversive novel is the story that only he could write. Dr.