National Network for Equitable Library Service

Like any young man, Etienne longs for independence and dreams about a bright future. But he’s a Tourangeau, part of a sprawling Quebec family that, though destitute, thrives as insecurely as weeds in a well-tended garden, nurtured by a mother whose abundant love is more than maternal. Then he meets Odile, a beautiful young woman from a good family who inspires Etienne to transform his future into something worthy of her. But, like Romeo and Juliet, their wild, pure love for each other cannot last.

Where is reality to be found: at the surface of things or behind it?Max Willem, a young art student in Montreal at the end of the 1960s, becomes obsessed with outward appearances - with makeup, costume, and masks of all kinds. For him, outward reality, and in particular that of the opposite sex, is composed of many veils of illusion and artifice through which he must see if he is to feel fully alive. At the same time, Max discovers his exceptional talent for art forgery.

In the legend-steeped Borders region of Scotland, a writer discovers the hidden past of the man she loves and the truth of her mothers teachings.

Short-listed for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada Region A man of innate taste and discrimination, Edward has become an art dealer and collector of fine antiques and paintings. During his first six idyllic years he was the centre and focus of his mother's existence. Betrayals and unhappiness in subsequent years have led him to form almost fetishistic attachments to beautiful objects, as a substitute for the human relationships that have invariably failed him.

A translator, fed up with translating paperback romances, undertakes the translation of the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer, Leonard Ming. She travels from Canada to Spain to do her work, encountering love and death in the seaside Andalusian town of Almunecar.

Novelist and poet Claude Le Bouthillier draws on his Acadian and New Brunswick heritage to create Phantom Ships. First published in 1989 as Le Feu du Mauvais Temps, it gives an account of the end of the French Empire in Canada as experienced by the authors own ancestor, Joseph Le Bouthillier.

Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine’s Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson’s murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute’s patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the human psyche.

Christian Petersen beautifully reins in the confusion and displacement of a diminishing band of men facing the daily spectre of an unforgiving land, men enslaved to the grind of the sawmill, hunkered on bar stools, high in the saddle of a John Deere, or wild behind the wheel speeding down dirt roads to the Fraser. Here are fathers, brothers, lovers in search of forsaken children, bygone loves, and memories long faded in the wash of fast-running streams and firelight.

Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Translation Larry Volt is one of the rare Quebec novels that deals with the FLQ crisis. Pierre Tourangeau captures a generation of young people who are rebelling, but above all, searching.

Runner-up for the 2004 ReLit Award High fashion, higher stakes, sex, glamour, and great clothes, Stacey Schmidt gets a taste of all these when he’s suddenly propelled from suburban model hell into the garment jungle of today’s Toronto. Stacey’s part black, part white, and apparently on a fast track to fame, fortune, and all the women he could ever want, though at times it seems as if he’s standing still. But does he really want the glitz?