National Network for Equitable Library Service

Explores the notion of disappearance and the anxieties associated with things gone missing--family, friendship, sanity, love.

Keen, intense, darkly comic, and accident-prone, the short fictions of David Whitton are full of sullen underdogs: his characters clean up real nice, but can’t help but unravel back to their original fallen and fascinating selves. Their mistakes and misdeeds, temptations and transgressions trample through these stories, twisting out intricate surprises at each turn.

Watershed is a contemporary dystopian novel set in a near-future southern Alberta, which has been ravaged by desert-like conditions, as opposed to the northern part of the province, which is warm as well as green and lush thanks to a water pipeline from the ocean. The province's former oil and gas pipelines are being converted to carry desalinated sea water, and the north and south are at odds because of it. The protagonist, Wilma, is desperately trying to hold onto her dying family farm, while her son, Daniel, takes a job for the enemy: the big water pipeline corporation.

Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel about the bloody folk legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam, and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia during the gold rush.

Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.

A fast-paced literary eco-thriller about the power of resistance, the fine line between activism and terrorism, and what happens when things go too far. Set in 1993 on Vancouver Island, a group of idealistic young activists, determined to do whatever it takes to protect the environment, turn to sabotage. But in a single moment everything they've worked for goes horribly wrong, when a night watchman at a logging company warehouse is killed in an explosion that they set. Two Roads Home follows these activists as their lives-- and their cause-- spiral out of control.

After Morgan Wells's wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells - but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto. On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ever written.

The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how--sloppily. Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak's editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly indifferent student body. But trouble looms large when a big-money free daily comes to the west-coast campus, threatening to swallow what remains of their readership whole.

A'isha Nasir is a Nigerian teenager who has been charged with adultery. She is sentenced to death by stoning--a sentence to be carried out after her daughter is weaned. Sophie MacNeil is an ambitious, though inexperienced, Canadian journalist living in Nigeria. Speechless is the story of how their lives become intertwined in a fast-paced tale of justice, witness, and courage. Speechless offers a thoughtful and complex view of how stories are told. Who should tell a story? What happens when one speaks on behalf of another?

These ten strikingly original stories explore love and escape--how we escape to love, escape through love, and escape ourselves and hold on to love. Together, the stories of Welcome to the Circus highlight the courageous, acrobatic circus acts we all learn to perform in search of love.