National Network for Equitable Library Service

After her marriage of 25 years ended badly, Linda Kenyon was determined to never put herself in the way of a broken heart again. But then she met an extraordinary man, and in an act of great courage -- or foolishness -- decided to sell everything she owned and sail across the ocean with him. Sea Over Bow: Crossing the North Atlantic is the account of that journey. It takes readers to the middle of the ocean, a place most people have only imagined. It describes the trail of sparkling blue-green light that traces their path across the water at night.

What happens when a 56-year-old fiction writer decides to ditch it all and attend professional pastry chef school for a year? In writing that brings to mind the work of journalist/chef Michael Ruhlman, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School tells the story of eleven months of whipping, spreading and creaming in the pursuit of perfection. When Denise Roig set out to do this -- a lark, she thought -- she had no idea what it would cost and what it would give back. Butter Cream is the chronicle of an intense year of learning and tasting, dramas at the stove and in the locker room.

"May you live in interesting times." So goes the ancient Chinese curse. In Quebec, we are always living in "interesting" times. Where else in Canada, perhaps even the world, do you have official language police that patrol the highways and byways of the province looking for missing accents, illegal apostrophes and on/off switches in the wrong language? Where else in Canada do you have to make sure that sign size matters? Is it 30% bigger or smaller than the other? Where else in Canada do you pause to consider how to say hello to someone before you actually do?

It's spring in Toronto and the Hollywood movie crews are back. This is where art meets commerce full force. Instant communities are created, like summer camps for adults, with the cast and crews working long hours and always under pressure. Over the six weeks of production, the cast and crew lives, loves, hates, wins and loses together on and off the film set. Inspired by the authors' own experiences, Below the Line goes behind the scenes and tells the the stories of on-set romances, ambitions, cynics and even artists.

Some people claim they'd like to walk away from their lives -- Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it selfishness, or self-preservation? Drawing upon childhood memories, hikes, road trips, foreign travel, her self-imposed exile to a prairie village, fortuitous meetings with strangers, and her compulsion for starting over, again and again, Leedahl has crafted a provocative and candid collection of essays that explore the implicit complexities and contradictions when personal and professional lives both complement and clash.

About one million years ago, when Homo Erectus decided to walk on two legs, he must have sensed that things would never be the same for him again - -that he could kiss his old ape habits goodbye. No more swinging from tree branch to tree branch, no more throwing his feces around. He would have also been the first to admit that he wasn't quite ready yet for martinis, smoking jackets and Masterpiece Theatre.

Montreal was the literary centre of Canada in the 1940s, a hotbed of literary activity in both English and French crowned by the international success of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute. With the rise of nationalism in both English Canada and Quebec, Toronto emerged as the literary centre of English Canada, with Montreal the literary centre of Quebec. In literary terms, Canada and Quebec became two different countries, with two different languages and two different literatures.

Details the innovative, courageous, and creative activism of the "second wave" women's health movement in Canada between 1960 and 2010. This activism (re)claimed women's bodies, created women-centered spaces and services, and challenged a medically dominated healthcare system. Feminists challenged diagnoses, treatments, laws, policies, and research, as well as the care women were offered the way they saw their bodies and themselves.

During the 1970s and 1980s, after the Royal Commission on the Status of Women made its far-reaching recommendations, the volunteer Ontario Committee on the Status of Women went head-to-head with the Ontario government of Premier William Davis to fully implement equality for women in Ontario. Areas of concern were in employment, pay and benefits, child care and reproduction rights, education and training, family law, pensions, politics and the civil service, and human rights generally.

At the age of three, Arthur Biyarslanov fled with his family from the war-ravaged frontier of Chechnya. Narrowly escaping bullets and a bomb that destroyed the car in front of his family, Arthur and his brother ran to the border and forded a freezing river to safety. He became a refugee first in Azerbaijan, and ultimately in Canada. In spite of these difficult experiences, and the trials that confront any child refugee in strange lands, Arthur thrived on the discipline and camaraderie of sport, taking up first competitive soccer and then boxing.