National Network for Equitable Library Service

During a sweltering summer, Dills must come to terms with a horrific crime and the parent he loves who committed it. Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Windsor behind. But it's impossible to escape the echoes of tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble. When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Windsor High library when the shooter came in. But he won't talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can't.

Away From Hermeets Strangers on a Trainin this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained DownAfter And The Birds Rained Down, a stunning meditation on aging and freedom, Jocelyne Saucier is back with her unique outlook on self-determination in this unsettling story about a woman's disappearance. Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms.

Ana and Win find themselves stuck, lifting the weight of their pasts, while frustrated by their present jobs: photographing vacant lots and decayed industrial sites, cataloguing the decline of capitalist excess to digitally scrub away humanity to make way for more gentrification.

Winner, Dartmouth Book Award. Shortlisted, Atlantic Booksellers Choice Award. A small Canadian island declares its independence to the world and benign anarchy reigns. A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island's inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing.

What if you could see yourself as others see you? Astra is a beguiling debut novel that reveals the different faces of one woman, as seen through the eyes of ten people over a lifetime. Born and raised on a remote British Columbia commune, Astra Brine has long struggled to find her way in the world, her life becoming a study of the thin line between dependence and love, need and desire.

Curtis tells the story of his relationship with a blind Aunt whose lover, Phillip, a Vancouver artist, died in 1917. Reading aloud to her the diary Phillip kept for a few months before his death, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life--his desire to become a good artist and to find some kind of love in his own life. But, like Harriet, he is blind in some ways--especially to the attentions of a gay friend.

In Snowton, Alberta, secrets flourish like the crocuses in spring. When Louise Till lets herself into a neighbor's home using a surreptitiously copied key, she discovers more than she ever wanted to know about her small town and herself. Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father's hardware store after her parents' unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers' keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn't.

A Brief View from the Coastal Suite, a sequel to What is Going to Happen Next, follows the lives of the four Lund siblings who are now in their 30s and 40s, as they navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and creative work during the Vancouver real estate boom. Mandalay, now a single parent, struggles with economic marginalization to negotiate a meaningful community for her children. Cleo is professionally successful, but must calculate the cost to other aspects of her life.

Lightning-struck and pregnant, Ruth feels her husband slipping away after they-and unborn Gayle-miraculously survive the bolt out of the blue. Nineteen years later and stuck on the farm her husband bought before abandoning the family, painting is the only activity invigorating Ruth as the days slowly pass. That is until-without warning-Gayle finds herself love-struck and runs off to Edmonton, where she contends with poverty, illness, her shattered childhood, and the longstanding mystery of her father's disappearance.

The girls at North Bay Academy are taking sides. It all started when Mike Parker's girlfriend showed up with a bruise on her face. Or, more specifically, when she walked into the principal's office and said Mike hit her. But her classmates have questions. Why did she go to the principal and not the police? Why did she stay so long if Mike was hurting her? Obviously, if it's true, Mike should be expelled. But is it true? Some girls want to rally for his expulsion-and some want to rally around Mike. The only thing that the entire student body can agree on? Someone is lying.