National Network for Equitable Library Service

Summer camp isn't quite what Henry expected. Henry was ready for a fun summer with friends at a mountain bike camp in the wilderness. However, the head counsellor, Shifty, seems more interested in putting them to work hammering nails and hauling building supplies, instead of teaching bike skills and lighting campfires. Worse still, every time Henry tries to find a bit of freedom, something goes wrong! When Henry is reunited with his old pal Yarp (an extinct short-faced bear) and his fellow yarpies, things start to look up.

Paroled killer Cameron Shaw and small-town cop Staff Sgt. Meghan Quick find themselves on a collision course when the murder-by-arson of a college student sparks off gang violence along the forty-ninth parallel. In his masterful new crime novel, award-winning author Sam Wiebe juxtaposes small town life with multinational criminal operations. With the threat of a gang war looming, and long-buried secrets coming to light, Ocean Drive is a riveting exploration of the shadows cast by development and the harrowing choices individuals make when faced with the allure of easy money.

An inspiring story about the ups and downs of family. Fourteen-year-old Dylan is sent to live with his estranged grandfather, Angus. Basically strangers, the two avoid each other as best they can. One day Dylan discovers a young orca stranded high up on the rocky beach. Dylan runs to tell his grandfather. There's nothing that can be done, says Angus. The sun is coming up, and soon the orca will die of exposure. But Dylan knows he has to try to save the whale.

A quirky, thrilling, darkly-funny page-turner that explores the fuzzy lines between sanity and insanity, magic and reality, love and duty. It's 1969. An eight-year-old girl, Elizabeth Squire, has a choice to make: to be disabled by the circumstances of her own botched birth or to become extraordinary. In Buffy Cram's captivating new novel, Elizabeth narrates the story of her childhood in the late sixties, describing how she came to be at a Vancouver halfway house at the age of nineteen.

Oolichan Moon is a beautifully illustrated children's book about passing down traditional knowledge from Nisga'a Elders and the sacredness of traditional foods, particularly the oolichan fish. Together, author Samantha Beynon and illustrator Lucy Trimble have created a children's book rich with cultural knowledge and tradition that relates to their Nisga'a ancestry surrounding the oolichan fish.

"Required reading for any person troubled by our world right now."—Maureen Medved. Jake's life is shaped by the Spanish Civil War and the not-so-civil wars that go on within families and intimate relationships. With engaging wit and originality, David Spaner does for Vancouver what writers like Mordecai Richler and Philip Roth did for Montreal and Newark. Jake Feldman grows up on Keefer Street in the dynamic working-class immigrant neighbourhood of Strathcona in Vancouver.

"The best Iona Whishaw novel yet."—Castlegar News. Beginning with a bang, the latest mystery in the series Publishers Weekly calls "highly entertaining" is a study in bygone promises and lingering prejudice. A warm June afternoon in King's Cove is interrupted by an explosion. Following the sound, Lane goes to investigate. Up a steep path she discovers a secluded cabin and, hiding nearby, a young Japanese girl injured and mute, but very much alive.

This young reader novel begins with a high school field trip to the former gold rush town of Yale in British Columbia. Here Zach, Kyle, and their eccentric teacher, Miss Reid, are transported back in time to 1866 at the height of the Cariboo gold rush. Stranded in Yale, the threesome are taken under the wing of Theo Cox, who becomes their friend and persuades his brother Enos, who is carrying freight in his wagon to Barkerville, to take the three along with them.

Grant Buday's new novel is an eccentric coming-of-age story that captures the late-Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt, auras, and the afterlife. Smart, stubborn, and forthright Pearl Greyland-Smith is nine years old when we first meet her, in 1882. She lives with her widowed mother, Florence, in Victoria's James Bay neighbourhood. Pearl's father was a Hussar who died in Afghanistan, or that's what Florence has always told Pearl.

A captivating new thriller in the Wakeland detective series that explores the depths of Vancouver's criminal underworld. Caught between the grimy and glittering sides of Vancouver's streets, private investigator Dave Wakeland tries to keep his head down at the elite security firm he owns with partner Jeff Chen. But when masked men and women storm an ordinary-looking office building in Chinatown, leaving a trail of carnage, Wakeland finds himself caught up in a mystery that won't let him go, as hard as he tries to elude it.