Sally and Brian are in love. But at the end of a wonderful ski weekend together, a car accident leaves Sally fully paralyzed for life. This powerful, honest book tells of Sally's struggle immediately following the accident as she goes through rehabilitation. Her anger, her flirtation with drugs, and a dangerously angry fellow patient, and her slow, hesitant journey to finding a way to live with her new reality make this one of the strongest portraits of a life-transforming disability ever published for young adults. Yet the story and the author's life offer hope. Far too many young people continue to become paraplegic and quadriplegic in car accidents, diving accidents and other risk-taking behavior. This book lays no blame and makes no promises. But it shows that a way forward can be found.

Touched With Fire, a novel of the Civil War inspired by the true story of Ellen Craft. Ellen Craft is property; in this case, of her half-sister Debra, to whom she was given as a wedding gift. The illegitimate daughter of a Georgia plantation owner and a house slave, she learned to hate her own image, which so closely resembled that of her “father:” the same wiry build, the same blue eyes and the same pale — indeed, lily-white — skin. Ellen lives a solitary life until she falls, unexpectedly, in love with a dark-skinned slave named William Craft, and together they devise a plan to run North. Ellie will pose as a gentleman planter bound for Philadelphia accompanied by his “boy” Will. They make it as far as Baltimore when Will is turned back, and Ellie has no choice but to continue. With no way of knowing if he is dead or alive, she resolves to make a second journey — South again. And so Elijah Craft enlists with the 125th Ohio Volunteers of the Union Army: she will literally fight her way back to her husband. Eli/Ellie’s journey is the story of an extraordinary individual and an abiding love, but also of the corrosive effects of slavery and of a nation at a watershed moment. "I sat down yesterday to read Touched With Fire, and found it so entrancing that I finished it today. A tour de force. What an imaginative approach to take the real story of Ellen and William Craft and turn it into an exciting — and penetrating — Civil War story. You touched all the right bases about slavery and the war. I especially liked the episode of General Grant and Eli Craft bonding over their mutual love of horses. I look forward to the second volume of the trilogy, and beyond that a third, when the time comes." — Prof. James McPherson, Author of Battle Cry of Freedom

New York City in the 1960s is the humming backdrop for this poignant, gritty story about a girl who sees her parents as flawed human beings for the first time, and finds the courage to make a fresh start. Missy’s mother has gone back to school to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. Missy’s father works in advertising and takes Missy on secret midnight excursions to Harlem and the Village so she can share his love of jazz. The two write poems for each other — poems that gradually become an exchange of apologies as Missy’s father’s alcohol and drug addiction begins to take over their lives. When Missy’s mother finally decides that she and her daughter must make a fresh start, Missy has to leave her old apartment, her school, her best friend and her cats and become a latchkey kid while her mother gets a job. But she won’t give up on trying to save her family, even though this will involve a hard journey from innocence to action, and finally acceptance. Based on the events and people of her own childhood, Amanda Lewis’s gorgeous novel is driven by Missy’s irresistible, optimistic voice, buoyed by the undercurrents of poetry and music.

As the son of a Korean family of substance the author of this autobiographical sketch grew up, in the early years of the century, among unsettling influences from east and west. Europe, known as "West of the Ocean," supplied modern education to replace the old classics of China and Korea. From the east came Japanese troops to annex the country in a bloodless war. Mirok Li, a perceptive and receptive schoolboy, saw this political scene in terms of his day-to-day experience. The remarkable thing is that he continued to see it with the same clarity, truth and detail when came to write the story many years later in Europe, using a simple German that his translator may perhaps have improved on Mr. Hammlmann's English version, at least, is lucent calm and fully expressive of the closely felt Korean scene that stirs the reader by its blend of intimacy and remoteness.

The Walking Man begins in the deserts of Jordan and explores a year in the life of the main character - someone very similar to the author - and his attempts to make sense of a tumultuous year. Based on many of the author's experiences, The Walking Man mixes reality and fiction in a tale of heartbreak, friendship, and personal history that uses walking to thread it all together. Whether he is tripping through a blackout in downtown Toronto, stumbling into a massive war re-enactment, or outwitting the law while speed-walking beside his 93-year-old scooter-riding confidant, Mary, the Walking Man eventually makes his way, on foot, all the way from Toronto to Niagara Falls in his quest to find the truth.

When Phyllis Webstad (nee Jack) turned six, she went to the residential school for the first time. On her first day at school, she wore a shiny orange shirt that her Granny had bought for her, but when she got to the school, it was taken away from her and never returned. This is the true story of Phyllis and her orange shirt. It is also the story of Orange Shirt Day, an important day of remembrance for all Canadians.

Autobiographical novel of a scholar’s son’s coming of age in small village during the Japanese occupation, though that is felt with some distance. Kang focuses on classical education in that era, traditions for holidays and ceremonies, schooling, friends, family dynamic, a detailed account of Sam-Il, and finally emigration to America as young man.

Lily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date, and, significantly too, her most autobiographical work. '' As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, and family in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Told with Tuck's inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.

A debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she has written the works of Baudelaire. One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. Surprising as this may be, it's no more surprising to Brown than the impossible journey she's taken to become the writer that she is. Animated by the spirit of the poète maudit, she shuttles between London, Vancouver, Paris, and the French countryside, moving fluidly between the early 1980s and the present, from rented room to rented room, all the while considering such Baudelairian obsessions as modernity, poverty, and the perfect jacket. Part memoir, part magical realism, part hilarious trash-talking take on contemporary art and the poet's life, The Baudelaire Fractal is the long-awaited debut novel by the inimitable Lisa Robertson.