Fernie Heritage Library

It's the summer of 1990, and Crystal Beach in Ontario has lost its beloved, long-running amusement park, leaving the lakeside village a virtual ghost town. It is back to this fallen community that Bailey Enrica Martin must return to live with her overbearing mother after dropping out of university and racking up significant debt. But an economic downturn, mother-daughter drama, and Generation X disillusionment soon prove to be the least of Bailey's troubles: a mysterious and salacious force begins to dog her; inexplicable sounds in the night and unimaginable sites spotted in the periphery. Soon enough, Bailey must confront the unresolved traumas that haunt Crystal Beach. 

"As a blue whale decays on the beach, and more wildlife turns up dead--apparently by suicide--Marty Bird's deepest desires seem to echo through the natural world. But Julie isn't ready for a world without her father. A stunning exploration of love and grief, Land Mammals and Sea Creatures is magical realism on the seaside, a novel about living life to the fullest and approaching its end on your own terms."--Back cover.

Junior and Hen are a quiet married couple. They live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with surprising news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm - very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Hen won't have a chance to miss him at all, because she won't be left alone - not even for a moment. Hen will have company. Familiar company.

Ayesha Shamsi is a secular Muslim. When she begins working with Khalid, a conservative, handsome young Muslim man, on a fundraiser for the mosque, she has to deal with both her attraction to him and her irritation with his complacency. Once her gorgeous young cousin becomes engaged to him, however, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and her suspicions about his wealthy family. Taking it upon herself to investigate rumours about them, she finds she has to deal with not just what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth of what she realizes about herself.

In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, Kailash describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor - also an immigrant. The brilliant melding of story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, gives us a singularly engaging, insightful, and moving novel - one that explores the varieties and vagaries of cultural misunderstanding, but is, as well, an impassioned investigation of love.

Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. A traumatic assault leads to a crystallization of her alternate selves: Asụghara and Saint Vincent. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these selves, now protective, now hedonistic, move into control, Ada's life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.

From the author of the runaway bestseller The Orphan's Tale comes a remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.1946, Manhattan. One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs--each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.

Cara Hargraves pries open an old tin: among the treasures, a World War II-era diary and a photograph of a young woman in uniform. Eager to find the author of the hauntingly beautiful, unfinished diary, Cara digs into this soldier's life. An illuminating the story of two women separated by generations and experience, author Julia Kelly transports us to World War II London in this heartbreakingly beautiful novel through forgotten antique treasures, remembered triumphs, and fierce family ties.

"The downtown core of Toronto is being consumed by elysium, a drug that allows its users to slip through the permeable edges of this world and then consumes them utterly. Peddled by the icy Srebrenka, few have managed to escape the drug and its dealer. But Maggie has. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," the Grimoire of Kensington Market is the story of Maggie, guardian of the Grimoire bookstore, which expands and contracts as stories are born . . . or die. Only those who are destined to find the Grimoire enter through its front door. But one day a messenger arrives with a mysterious note that reads, "follow me." The next day, another note arrives and then another. The messages, Maggie realizes, are from her brother, Kyle, who has fallen under the influence of the elysium. Kyle has gone too far into the Silver World and needs his sister, a recovering addict herself, to rescue him. Driven by guilt and love in equal measure, Maggie sets off on a quest where bands of robbers stalk the woods, tavern keepers weave clouds to hide mountains and caribou fly on the northern lights. A journey where dreams and the dead both come to life."--Publisher.

The suburbs of the 1970s promised to be Heaven on Earth - new houses, new status, happiness guaranteed. But in a Scarborough subdivision populated by newcomers from all over the world, a series of sudden catastrophic events reveals that not everyone's dreams come true. Moving from house to house, Carrianne Leung explores the inner lives behind the tidy front gardens and picture-perfect windows, always returning to June, an irrepressible adolescent Chinese-Canadian coming of age in this shifting world. Through June and her neighbours, Leung depicts the fine line where childhood meets the realities of adult life, and examines, with insight and sharp prose, how difficult it is to be true to ourselves at any age.

"Prin is a forty-year-old English professor who lives in Toronto. Following a cancer diagnosis, he resolves to be a better husband, father, and Catholic. He has a chance to do so when he learns that his university is going to shut down unless it comes up with a new purpose. He's asked to figure this out in the company of a Chinese real estate magnate and his flirty ex-girlfriend while also dealing with the demands of having four small children, a skeptical wife, and deranged, recently divorced parents. In the middle of a business meeting he has a mystical religious experience that compels him to go to the Middle East--with his ex-girlfriend--where he encounters God, temptation, and a gun-toting young Muslim man who also wants to do something big for his faith. A novel about a deeply Catholic Sri Lankan English professor, Original Prin is a strangely funny book sure to touch, vex, and amuse."-- Provided by publisher.

"Not since Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. There There introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame in Oakland. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honour his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Big Oakland Powwow with darker intentions. Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. A glorious, unforgettable debut."-- Provided by publisher.

"A strange illness induces sleep and heightens dreams in an isolated college town, transforming the lives of ordinary people, in this mesmerizing novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. A college girl tells her friends that she's feeling strangely tired. The next morning, when they find her in bed, she is still breathing--but she won't wake up. Within a few days, another student, down the hallway, won't wake up. As the sleeping sickness spreads, the town is turned upside down. We meet Ben and Annie, a young couple determined to keep their newborn baby safe; Sara and Libby, whose survivalist father has long prepared for disaster; Mei and Matthew, and other college students. A quarantine is established, the national guard is summoned. Yet, those who have fallen asleep are showing unusual patterns of brain activity. More than has ever been recorded in any brain--asleep or awake. They are dreaming--but of what? With gorgeous prose and heart-stopping emotion, The Dreamers startles and provokes about the possibilities contained within a human life, when we are awake and, perhaps even more, when we are dreaming."-- Provided by publisher.

"In a delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, one woman's trash becomes another woman's treasure, with deliriously entertaining results. Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '69 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one--not always charitably--and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds. In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, "spark joy"), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment. But when it's found in the recycling bin by a busybody neighbor/documentary filmmaker, the yearbook's mysteries--not to mention her own family's--take on a whole new urgency, and Daphne finds herself entangled in a series of events both poignant and absurd. Good Riddance is a pitch-perfect, whip-smart new novel from an "enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original, and Austen-like stylist" (Washington Post)"--

"The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways."--