National Network for Equitable Library Service

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the '80s and she hasn't seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she's twenty-five and he's missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Quebecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo.

2016. Social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother's belongings after the funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery: two dead girls curled into the bottom of Donna's deep-chest freezers. A pair of teenaged sisters had lived with the family in 1988 as foster children: Casey and Jamie Cheng from Vancouver's Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away.

The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut novel by a powerful new voice. A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry - particularly at Gamma Beta Chi. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus.

Go back to the beginning of the Collins-Burke mysteries with this collection, which includes the first three novels in the award-winning series: Sign of the Cross, Obit, and Barrington Street Blues. Sign of the Cross: This winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel introduces lawyer Monty Collins who meets Father Brennan Burke when he represents him: the priest is the lead suspect in the murder of a young woman. Conflict between lawyer and client simmers, as evidence piles up and murder charges seem inevitable.

Thirtysomething Nicky Fowler has it all-- a rewarding career, a loving husband and the perfect home. But when she and her husband suffer a complicated tragedy, the strain of two people dealing with an impossible situation in different ways breaks up their marriage. Emotionally lost, Nicky travels to Kenya to volunteer at an orphanage. Amidst the violence and abject poverty, Nicky discovers the one thing that keeps Kenyans moving forward: hope.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.

A profoundly moving exploration of our capacity to heal one another. Ellie and Eric Nyland have moved their two sons back to Eric's childhood farmhouse, hoping for a fresh start. But there's no denying it, their family is falling apart, each one of them isolated by private sorrows, stresses, and missed signals. With every passing day, Ellie's hopes are buried deeper in the harsh winter snows.

A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. The community leadearship loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve.

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai--her first in sixteen years--a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction. Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a "starfish," a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing.

A poignant, multi-voiced novel about life in the inner city. Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight.