National Network for Equitable Library Service

Nerves crunch at the international classical guitar competition in Montreal. There is more than pretty music being performed on this stage. At the International Classical Guitar Competition in Montreal, top-flight musicians fly in from all over the world to compete in a gruelling week. A career can be made or lost here, and the slightest mishap - a lapse of memory, a shaking right hand, a broken fingernail - can ruin years of preparation.More than a decade ago Toby made the finals in a similar competition but suffered a breakdown and is only now venturing back into the fray.

A dark comedy about a young man’s aspirations to be something better than he currently is. Frustrated 35-year-old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father’s plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac’s had dreams of attending the University of Michigan that fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn’t stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical textbook and journal available to him.

Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the 2002 Roger Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Rescued from the dangers he faces in a Latin American military dictatorship, writer Carlos Romero Estevez is given a new life in Vancouver. His rescuers, a benevolent group devoted to aiding oppressed writers, believe they've found a poster-boy. Carlos thinks he's found a new life, new freedom, and new, powerful friends. But soon everyone's illusions are dispelled, and Carlos finds life in exile to be a new kind of prison.

The Town Below changed the face of Québécois literature. The Town Below takes place in St. Joseph Parish of Quebec City’s Saint-Sauveur suburb. Saint-Sauveur is a parochial and provincial place where narrow piety and corruption can be found in every corner, and Denis and Lise, two adolescents in love, scandalize the town with their affair.

When West meets East in India, tradition, modernity, and necessity cast disturbing slants on the truth. When Georgia accepts the assignment to research prostitution in India, she enters blithely, confident of her ability to remain objective in the face of the difficult subject matter. Provided with an Indian guide, Karma, Georgia feels that she is in control of her well-being and safety.

Is it a happy ending? Define happy. Stuart Lewis, thirty-three, in love and content, wakes up one day to find his fiance has left him. Perpetually underemployed and now homeless, Stuart moves onto his mother’s couch. With few connections and no ambition, Stuart is forced to rethink the choices he has made and the sincerity of the life that has just been shattered. Set against the frigid backdrop of downtown Toronto, The Year She Left casts an eclectic bunch of directionless underachievers and unlikely heroes amid the buzz of late night binges and early corporate bustle.

Christopher Redmond’s fascinating account of Doyle’s first trip to America has been reconstructed from newspaper accounts describing the places Doyle visited, from the Adirondacks to New York, Chicago, and Toronto. Despite the gruelling tour schedule, Doyle met dozens of the most important literary and social lights of America. Everywhere he went he was mobbed by public hungry for news of the man he had "killed off" a year earlier — Sherlock Holmes, who was front page news.

Syllables of Recorded Time is a lively look at the development over the last six decades of a national authors’ association, with all its problems and foibles. Personalities such as Bliss Carman, Nellie McClung, Stephen Leacock, B.K. Sandwell, W.A. Deacon, Mazo de la Roche, John Murray Gibbon, Helen Chreighton, Watson Kirkconnell, Charles G.D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott figure prominently in the amusing anecdotes of the early days, and Hugh MacLennan, Pierre Berton, Dorothy Livesay and Arthur Hailey in the later years.

Sherlock Holmes Handbook sums up a Canadian scholar's lifetime expertise about Sherlock Holmes -- the characters and themes, the publishers and readers, Victorian London and the Houdini connection, radio actors and cartoonists, the fans who cling to Holmes's reality and the professors who tease out motifs from the fifty-six short stories and four novels. The first edition of Sherlock Holmes Handbook appeared in 1993.

Arthur James Marshall Smith — prize-winning poet, essayist, influential anthologist, and critic — died in 1980. His last book, The Classic Shade: Selected Poems, on which Selected Writings is based, stands as his final intention in the world of literature.To this long out of print book the editor has added original material by Smith in which he defined and advanced modernism in Canadian writing. This edition also includes annotation, an extended introduction, and a bibliography.