National Network for Equitable Library Service

Short-listed for the 2008 Red Maple Award Keira, kidnapped from Ireland by Vikings, is a slave living in legendary Vinland. Two native bands, the Beothuck and the Thule, are also fighting over the land, thrusting the Norsemen into war. While the Vikings search for a new home, an accident at sea leaves Keira miraculously saved by a Beothuck warrior. Keira settles into the Beothuck way of life, learning their customs and coming to care for them. But she dreams of risking everything in order to find a way home.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but what about three? JP Rodriguez’s debut novel is an examination of what it means to live a modern life and the price of inaction in a world where chances at redemption and happiness are all too few. Watched over by the majestic mountains of the Canadian west, the narrator came early to understand that every action creates a reaction, and what goes up comes downusually hard. So he’s spent his life in an emotional straitjacket, living comfortably on the surface of things.

Thirteen-year-old Jane Covington doesn’t want to go to Sky Lake to visit her grandmother for the summer holidays - she wants to visit her father in the north. But when she returns to the cottage on the lake with the tall cliff, she is happy to be back in the golden country sunshine. However, Jane soon involves herself in a mystery when she finds a seventy-year-old cry for help in the form of a very old letter. She traces it to the story of a suspicious fire that took place long ago.

Short Candles is a novel about possibility, choice and acceptance and is remarkable for its insights into human nature. Opening in the 1960s, it spans some forty years in the life of Suzanne Cardinal, who has the giftor bears the burdenof foresight. While she becomes a visionary to some people in her home town, to her family she is the difficult child who was unable to warn them of an impending death. But Suzanne has little control over the manifestation of her gift. She speaks only when she has a vision and ends by hurting both those she warns and those she does not warn.

Vikkan Lantry, a pianist with more talent than ambition, is content with his job at an upscale cocktail lounge until a request from reclusive soprano, Ulrike Vogel, draws him grudgingly back into the world of classical music. Ulrike’s mysterious past, and her friendship with elderly Viennese piano teacher, Dieter Mann, usher Vikkan into an intrigue that begins in the nineteenth century with an unknown song cycle composed by Robert Schumann, and ends in the present-day with a grisly double murder.

In this Christmas classic, six-year-old Sarah is determined to make the very best snowman possible, without the help of her older brother. When she sees her snowman, Max, come to life in a Christmas Eve frolic, her family refuses to believe her story. Although Sarah thinks she has proof that it was not all a dream, she decides in the end to keep the knowlege of her snowman friend as her very own special secret.

Feeling somehow to blame for her father’s absence, thirteen-year-old Jennifer Bannon struggles to hang on to her dream that he will return and they can be a family again - a dream that doesnt include her mother’s new boyfriend, nights of looking after her little sister or a ninth grade year that is rapidly going down the toilet. Finally after two years of waiting Jennifer learns that her father is back in town, and suddenly the dream seems within reach.

In the third action-packed thriller of the West Quebec series, Meg Harris is back more determined than ever to fight against injustice, but sometimes the line between right and wrong is fuzzy. During a wild, whitewater paddle down a wilderness river, Meg discovers the skull and bones of a woman whose very existence takes the archeological world by storm. But when her neighbours, the Migiskan Algonquin, declare their rights to the ancient remains, Meg becomes embroiled in a fight that pits ancient beliefs against modern ones and can only lead to murder.

A young Québécoise sneaks off to meet her Algonquin lover in an isolated hunting camp on the Migiskan Reserve. Five days later, Meg Harris discovers her frozen and brutalized body. The young Native is charged with her murder, and Meg feels responsible, since the young woman was a member of a crew which was helping her to clear some ski trails. Meanwhile both Meg and her friend, band chief Eric, are faced with another disaster. Someone is supplying the band’s children with drugs. Are the events connected?

After surviving the horrors of the Great War, Paul Shenstone works as a police detective in 1920s Toronto, rooting out petty criminals and rumrunners. The unusual murder of a prominent industrialist gives him the biggest case of his career and a not entirely welcome opportunity to make his name on the force. The waters are muddied when the investigation starts uncovering connections between the deceased Digby Watt and soldiers Shenstone knew in Flanders. What will Shenstone’s choice be if he has to arrest one of his own comrades?