Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award 2015 — Nominated Faith healers, movie moguls, and social-climbing fraudsters collide in Depression-era Los Angeles It’s the Great Depression and Mary Mabel McTavish is suicidal. A drudge at the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies (aka Wealthy Juvenile Delinquents), she is at London General Hospital when little Timmy Beeford is carried into emergency and pronounced dead. He was electrocuted at an evangelical road show when the metal cross on top of the revival tent was struck by lightning. Believing she’s guided by her late mother, Mary Mabel lays on hands. Timmy promptly returns to life. William Randolph Hearst gets wind of the story and soon the Miracle Maid is rocketing from the Canadian backwoods to ’30s Hollywood. Jack Warner, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Rockettes round out a cast of Ponzi promoters, Bolshevik hoboes, and double-dealing social climbers in a fast-paced tale that satirizes the religious right, media manipulation, celebrity, and greed.

Winner, Dartmouth Book Award. Shortlisted, Atlantic Booksellers Choice Award. A small Canadian island declares its independence to the world and benign anarchy reigns. A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island's inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers' guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce's novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

Bright but anxious teenager Aleisha is working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a list of novels that she's never heard of before. When she passes along the list to a lonely widower, a connection between two lonely souls is formed, as fiction helps them escape their grief and everyday troubles and find joy again.

The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendency toward his own ends. As revolutions go, this one might have been nonviolent, but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the events of 1970 and their repercussions are finally catching up with Keith Nearing.

Like a tourist visiting his own life, David Gilmour's narrator journeys in time to reexamine those critical moments that created him. He revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, the shock of a parent's suicide, the trauma of a best friend's bizarre dissembling, and the pain and humiliation of unrelenting jealousy, among other rites of passage. Set within an episodic narrative arc stories about the profound effect of Tolstoy, of the Beatles, of the cult of celebrity, of the delusion of drugs, and of the literary life on the winding road of the narrator's progress. This compelling and deeply interesting picaresque novel is a creative tour de force from the hand of one of our master storytellers. The Perfect Order of Things breaks new fictional ground and is an astonishing story of a life lived fully and with breathtaking passion. David Gilmour is a novelist who has earned critical praise from literary figures as diverse as William Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and from publications as different as the New York Times to People magazine. The author of six novels, he also hosted the award-winning Gilmour on the Arts. In 2005, his novel A Perfect Night to Go to China won the Governor General's Award for Fiction. His next book, The Film Club, was a finalist for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize. It became an international bestseller, and has sold over 200,000 copies in Germany and over 100,000 copies in Brazil. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

Artem Samsurov, an ardent follower of Lenin and a hero of the rebellion, flees his Siberian labor camp for the sanctuary of Brisbane, Australia in 1911. Failing to find the worker's paradise and brotherhood he imagined, Artem quickly joins the agitation for a general strike among the growing trade union movement. He finds a fellow spirit in a dangerously attractive female lawyer and becomes entangled in the death of another Tsarist exile. But, Atrem can't overcome the corruption, repression, and injustice of the conservative Brisbane. When he returns to Russia in 1917 for the Red October, will his beliefs stand' Based on the true story of Artem Sergeiv, a Russian immigrant in Australia who would play a vital role in the Russian Revolution, The People's Train explores the hearts of the men and women who fueled, compromised, and passionately fought for their ideals.

After decades of stability, climate stresses, never far from the surface, are bringing droughts, crop failures, and massive storms. The world's end--avoided once, centuries before--seems likely to succeed the second time. Scientist Sarah Nahanni has a possible solution, but the math is daunting and the number of mathematicians willing or even able to solve the equations is very small. With the ancient satellites failing and the roads filled with hostile armies, the path to recovery seems lost. Far to the south, Ivan Rodriguez, an unlikely genius, is on the run from the death squads of his feudal overlords, his head full of fears for his family and mathematical dreams of a better future. He holds the key to Sarah Nahanni's problem and would help--if only he knew she existed and he could reach her in time.

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.