House Of The Scorpion$11.50 add to cart

Does the idea of human clones raise the hair on the back of your neck? What would they be used for? How would they feel? Or would they even have feelings?

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer takes a prescient look at some of these questions. The story follows the clone of a powerful drug lord from his cultivation to his escape and beyond.

The book is packed with unputdownable action, as well as thoughtful responses to cruelty. Farmer also takes a complex look at the future of the drug empires that shift between the U.S. and Mexico.

Set in the near future, this book has won many awards and any teenager will love it.

The Lizard Cage$21.00 add to cart

In The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly, two brothers fight for a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi, one using words and the other using weapons.

more...

Fault Lines$29.95 add to cart

Nancy Huston's Fault Lines tells the story of a quintessential American-Jewish-German family--one whose horrifying history gradually reveals true courage.

The layered narratives of the characters echo through the novel and tie the characters to their parents and their pasts. Children who tell their stories at the beginning of the novel re-appear a generation or two later as adults with their own children or grandchildren observing them.

Huston's writing is especially satisfying because the voices of the children convincingly display all the misunderstandings, chaotic emotions, and hunger to be the centre of the universe that characterize childhood.

If you're interested in the Holocaust, or even just in children, you'll love this book.

People of the Book is a riveting mystery that swings back and forth between the present career of book conservator Hanna Heath and the precarious lives of the creators and protectors of an ancient Jewish holy book.

Brooks' brilliant characters throw their essential goodness in the path of evil, but cannot help but be smothered by the anger, prejudice and persecution they face. As the story flows through Spanish kidnapping and slavery, the Inquistion, late 19th century anti-Semetism, World War II, and the recent war in Bosnia, Brooks' vivid writing exposes the appalling rigidity of religious laws. At the centre of it all is the beauty of the book itself.

If you love books as objects and you love history you will be carried away by this wonderful, delicately constructed novel.

Invited to try out for a beginning university women's hockey team, 19-year-old Isabel Norris approaches campus life and the raucous team relationships with trepidation.

more...

In Cloud of Bone, the horrifying tragedy of Shanawdithit, the last of Newfoundland's Beothuk people, oozes into the lives of Kyle Holloway, a WWII deserter, and Judith Muir, a present day anthropologist investigating genocide and war crimes who is mourning her husband's sudden death.

more...

Strawberry Fields is the latest novel from the author of the enormously popular A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

more...

March$20.00 add to cart

This fascinating novel explores the conflicted life of preacher Mr. March, the father of the girls in Alcott's Little Women.

March attempts to live out his Christian faith against the background of the American Civil War. He leaves Concord as a blazing abolitionist, sure of the morality of his work with the Underground Railway. Donating his money to John Brown (and thus losing it to the purchase of arms for slave insurrection), he returns from the south a penniless, broken man, chastened by his inability to effect lasting change in the lives of the suffering people he has tried to serve.

more...

How well do we ever know our parents? Every parent keeps secrets from children to protect them from pain, sadness or past family horrors. And then our parents are gone, just as we begin to wonder about their lives. In The Visible World, Slouka's American protagonist pulls together the strands of his parents' past in WW II Czechoslovakia where his mother had loved another man, a Czech Resistence fighter responsible for the death of Hitler's annointed successor. Where she had set aside her promises to his father when the thunderbolt of love hit her. Where his father had waited patiently for her and eventually welcomed her back, shattered and never quite the same again.

In this stunning book, both the childhood point of view and then the young adult search are poignant and compelling, the forests of Eastern Europe eerie and the Nazi presence heavy and foreboding. It will leave you in tears. Speak to your parents now.