National Network for Equitable Library Service

Inspired by True Events “Men who weren’t hard workers didn’t last long at the lumber woods.” Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador have someone in their family who has worked “in the woods.” Some of these workers were employed seasonally—they fished in the summer and headed to the lumber camps in the winter—while others were full-time loggers who worked year-round. Stan White runs Camp 13 on the southwestern side of Gander Lake, which is a commercial operation cutting pulpwood for Bowater Pulp and Paper.

Lion Hunter is a historical novel that opens in Europe in 1941, during World War II, with the introduction of a German secret agent, Hans Farber, following a successful mission in Leningrad, Russia. His superior and head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, charges Hans with a nigh-impossible task: assassinate the prime minister of Britain, Sir Winston Churchill, at the rendezvous point between that political leader and the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

John Whelan, champion oarsman, has all but given up on competitive rowing. On the cusp of forty, the Outer Cove fisherman is trying to accept that his time as a rower has passed. His wife agrees, telling him, “Breaking your back down on that pond, that’s a young man’s sport.” But a fracas with the Torbay rowing crew in a St. John’s tavern rekindles his desire to beat his long-time rivals in the upcoming St. John’s Regatta. With the regatta just ten months away, can he and cox Watt Power assemble a championship crew in time? The answer is the stuff of legends.

The legend of Sheila NaGeira looms large in the early history of the New World. And it stretches back to Ireland in the 1500s and an ancient crone, Sheila Na Gig, whose form still haunts church doorways. NaGeira tells two interlocking stories. The first is of eighty-year-old Sheila, a midwife and healer living apart from a settlement at the North American Bristol plantation in 1660. The second, a parallel tale, tracks Sheila's early life in Dublin's English Pale where she is caught in the crossfire of politics and tragedy.

While the rest of the world anticipates a victorious end to the Second World War, sixteen-year-old Sheila Brary finds life in a remote British Columbia outport suffocating and isolating. A household full of brothers, a philandering father and, most of all, Sheila's embittered mother all stand in the way of a bright, beautiful teenager with ambitions and dreams -- to continue her schooling and become a nurse.

Finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Children's Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book It's 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Meanwhile, in rural Manitoba, fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Cote begins a war of her own as she and her brother and sister, all stricken with tuberculosis, are taken by their anguished parents to "chase the cure" at nearby Pembina Hills Sanatorium.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book About the Past, and selected as an Honor Book by the Society of School Librarians International Teddy can't believe how fast his life has changed in just two years. When he was twelve, his father took off, and then his mother married Henry, a man Teddy despises. But Teddy has no control over his life, and adults make all the decisions, especially in 1959. Henry decides that Teddy should be sent to St. Ignatius Academy for Boys, an isolated boarding school run by the Catholic church. St.

Winner of the Ruth Schwartz Award Jeanne Chatel has always dreamed of adventure. So when the eighteen-year-old orphan is summoned to sail from France to the wilds of North America to become a king's daughter and marry a French settler, she doesn't hesitate. Her new husband is not the dashing military man she has dreamed of, but a trapper with two small children who lives in a small cabin in the woods.

Winner of the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction The year is 1959, and fifteen-year-old Nipishish returns to his reserve in northern Quebec after being kicked out of residential school, where the principal tells him he's a good-for-nothing who, like all Indians, can look forward to a life of drunkenness, prison and despair. The reserve, however, offers nothing to Nipishish. He remembers little of his late mother and father. In fact, he seems to know less about himself than the people at the band office.

Winner, Margaret Laurence Award for FictionShortlisted, McNally Robinson Book of the Year and ReLit Award (Novel)Award-winning author Margaret Sweatman has proven herself a virtuoso writer of historical fiction. Yet nothing she has written can prepare you for Mr. Jones. Emmett Jones is adrift. Having firebombed civilians as a pilot during World War II, Emmett searches for something to cling to when life loses focus. Post-war, he becomes compulsively drawn to John Norfield, a former POW who has found his focus in communism. Set in a time of rampant paranoia, Mr.