National Network for Equitable Library Service

'So,' she says. 'Who died tonight?' Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes.

Peter Bayle - heavy drinker, philosopher to-be, anemic lover - somehow finds himself in Kansas, writing a feature article on middle America's newfound love for hockey. There he meets, among others, a morphine-injecting Reverend, a reviled reporter, a teenage drug dealer, and an ex-crack-addicted figure-skating team mascot.

Author Ray Smith has correlated the recent electronic version of the Confession with the Dubai Typescript and the even earlier Hong Kong Holograph. In a feat of unparalleled investigative journalism he has travelled the world corroborating the sordid and still highly sensitive details which are to this day denied by the intelligence services of five nations. A saga of perjury, speculation and perversion.

Once a celebrated war photographer, Lucas Zane is burnt out after covering twenty years of war. Drunk, hallucinatory, all ambition fled, Zane earns the rent working for an impresario of shoestring pornographic movies. Here he encounters Melissa and hatches a plan that might save her, his career, and quite possibly himself. The power of Combat Camera lies in its voice, a voice that is restless, ceaseless, meandering, tragic, sometimes very funny, a mind and a voice maintain an almost hypnotic grip on the reader.

A family’s story of the Holocaust lies buried in the soil of a graveyard in Prague, in the old neighborhoods of Montréal, in the serenity of a small New Jersey town, and in the memory of Jana – a woman finally asked to bear witness. Far from the landscapes of her earlier life, Jana raised her daughter, Willow, on the beautiful scrapbooks she kept of her own childhood in Prague before World War II. But her stories end with the beginning of the Holocaust, and Willow knows little of her mother’s life during the war and its immediate aftermath.

A biography that doesn’t quite exist, about a violinist who can’t be found, as told by people who don’t agree on much. Novelist Geoff Berner has been tasked with writing a biography of DD, a mysterious, charismatic, chimerical musician who has, it seems, dropped off the face of the earth. In the course of his search for DD, Berner interviews her friends, ex-bandmates, ex-lovers, and others. They paint such variable portraits of her that each successive attempt to describe her casts doubt on the previous testimony.

In this wickedly funny novel, one bad afternoon and two regrettable comments make the inimitable Philip Sharpe go viral for all the worst reasons. Dr. Philip Sharpe, absent-minded professor extraordinaire, teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto and is one of Canada’s most combative public intellectuals. But when a live TV debate with his fiercest rival goes horribly off the rails, an oblivious Philip says some things to her that he really shouldn’t have.

In America, not believing in God is anti-American, isn’t it? At fifty years of age, Roman Carr, whose real name is Romain Carrier, has made it. His television series In Gad We Trust, a scathing satire of the United States and its relationship with God, is a huge hit. He is carving out an enviable place for himself in Hollywood, the end of a long, tortuous journey for the man who fled his Gaspé Peninsula village in murky circumstances back in 1962. Both a coming-of-age story and a historical epic, Métis Beach is a chronicle of the great American Sixties.

From the author of the bestselling Jalna series. Switched at birth: two boys exchange lives for a year. This novel from Jalna author Mazo de la Roche tells the story of two families, English and American, on whom circumstances have played a strange prank which might have had unhappy consequences. As an experiment, they send off their sons to see the other's country, but then war intervenes, and the story of the Wyldes and the Rendels shows the problems and the promise of Anglo-American relationships now and for the future.

From the author of the bestselling Jalna series. This is essentially a novel of contrast — a story of light and shade, a contrast of Sicilian exuberance with the restraints of life in a Massachusetts fishing village. It finds beloved author Mazo de la Roche in a new vein. Here is a narrative lighter in quality than those which have to do with the turbulent Jalna scene, but no less sure in its characterization; no less picturesque in its detail.