NNELS Upgrade

In 1909, 13-year-old Luc Godin arrive in British Columbia from Quebec only to discover that the house they thought they'd move into hasn't been built. So the Godins have to make due with living in a railway boxcar with three other families. Luc's father and the many other newcomers to the Fraser Valley have come to work in the lumber industry. Their new home still has vestiges of the wilderness, and Luc and his family find find pioneering life difficult, especially as French speakers in a world of English.

Late in her life, acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Delamere makes a request of her therapist, Doctor Newman: she asks him to oversee the publication of her last book after she dies. It is a memoir in which she reveals that she is Evelyn Dick, the notorious "torso murderer" acquitted on appeal of dismembering her husband, and convicted of killing her infant son. In 1958 she was paroled, and disappeared into the mists of history. In Blue Moon, James King draws on the historical case of Evelyn Dick, and imagines her life after her release from prison.

Jason Stevens is an angry 15-year-old when his parents decide to move from Toronto to Lucan, Ontario, site of the notorious 1880 massacre of the Irish-Canadian Donnelly family.

After his "wonderful airship" crashes near St. Francis of Assisi's Home for Foundlings in Quebec City, Ben Franklin is thrown slightly off course in his carefully laid plan to coax Canada into joining the Americans in their fight against England's rule.A motley crew of orphans hides the famous inventor from the British Redcoats during the American War of Independence.

Ben and Charity Muldoon are 15-year-old twins who find themselves in the midst of politically charged events in the Saskatchewan River Valley in 1885. One day, as Ben is walking through a ravine, he encounters a Cree boy named Red Eagle, who quickly becomes his friend after a hair-raising rescue. Ben eventually discovers that a confrontation between the North-West Mounted Police and the Natives, led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, is imminent.

Short-listed for the 1988 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award and Trillium Book Award Paris, the City of Light, was once the scene of a brilliant magnesium flare, host to the belle epoque from 1900 to 1914. Tempting poets, painters, writers, and composers from across Europe, the city relied on one man to move among them all-Guillaume Apollinaire. His contemporaries called him brilliant, mad, whimsical.

In this gut-wrenching sequel to Loose Ends and Above Ground, Jack Taggart’s quest for justice takes him from the beaches of Cuba to the ghettos of Hanoi. Jack Taggart is an undercover Mountie whose quest for justice takes him from the sunny, tourist-laden beaches of Cuba to the ghettos of Hanoi. His targets deal in human flesh, smuggling unwitting victims for the sex trade. In a story fraught with raw emotion, Jack finds his partner accusing him of carrying out a personal vendetta, until he reveals the secret driving him forward.

Short-listed for the 1999 Silver Birch Award and for the 2001 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award Fifteen-year-old Rowan, the daughter of foreign correspondents in Africa, finds herself beached for a summer with her cousins near Tofino, British Columbia. Desperate for a summer project, she camps on a neighbouring island to monitor the progress of an endangered group of sea otters, further threatened by the development plans of a real estate agent trying to sell the property for tourism.

Runner-up for the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize On a stifling August day, six-year-old Clare Fraser and seven-year-old Rudy Vantwest make eye contact from opposite sides of their street. For an instant they are connected, then each turns away Clare to the shelter of the garden sprinkler, Rudy to the excitement of his brother’s impending birth. Twenty-five years later, Clare and Rudy, strangers living continents apart, fixtures of each others memories and imaginations, are connected again.

2008 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize — Longlisted Jack’s life and career are on the line in a gritty return to the dark Vancouver underworld of Loose Ends. RCMP detective Jack Taggart has avenged the murders of his niece and nephew, but the consequences linger. His deal with Damien, leader of the "Satans Wrath" motorcycle gang, has put him in a bind and jeopardized an informant in the gang.