The award-winning bestseller that became one of the most talked about and memorable novels of the decade, Room is utterly gripping...a heart-stopping novel (San Francisco Chronicle). Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her precocious young son finally gain their freedom, and the boy experiences the outside world for the first time.

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating -- a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.

How did your poor husband pass away?
Make it simple, Mama, I tried to bore into her, simple, simple...
His brains exploded.
I heard a gasp. It was me.
An aneurysm?
Okay, said Mama.
I'm sorry, hon, said Mrs. Haver. At least it was fast.
It vas? Mama looked puzzled. I nodded furiously at her. Ya. It vas. Yours?
Heart attack.
Oooo, dat's good too.
I could've killed her.

Sophie Kandinsky has spent the last six years trying to keep her crazy family life secret. The devil is in the details. The first detail is her larger-than-life, eccentric, Bulgarian mother. The slightly larger detail is the fact that her gentle, poet-father has been charged with murder. All Sophie wants is to be adored and invincible, which is really hard once people find out her father's in prison.

But this time, after yet another move to another new school, and another opportunity to wipe the slate clean, Sophie has devised a plan. On her first day of school, she will locate The Blondes--that clique of perfect, confident girls who are beyond gossip and reproach--and she will make them her friends. This time, no one will find out the truth. This time, everything will be brilliant.

Seventeen-year-old Luke's older sister, Pat, has always been his moral compass, like a voice inside his head, every time he has a decision to make. So when Pat disappears on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras and the authorities claim she's drowned - despite the fact that they can't produce a body - Luke heads to Honduras to find her because he knows something the authorities don't. From the moment of her disappearance, Pat's voice has become real, guiding him to Utila, where she had accepted a summer internship to study whale sharks. Once there, he meets several characters who describe his sister as a very different girl from the one knows. Does someone have a motive for wanting her dead? Determined to get to the bottom of Pat's disappearance, Luke risks everything, including his own life, to find the answer.

Before River, everything was perfect. . . .

Growing up on a Canadian dairy farm less than two miles from the American border, fifteen-year-old Natalie Ward knows little of the outside world. But her loving, close-knit family is the envy of young and old alike in the nearby town of Atwood. Natalie adores her three brothers--especially Boyer, the eldest, whom she idolizes. But everything changes one hot July afternoon in 1966 when a long-haired stranger appears at their door--a soft-spoken American, a Vietnam War resister, who will test the family's morals and beliefs, and set in motion catastrophic events that will shatter Natalie's relationships with those she most dearly loves.

An absolutely fabulous new young adult novel...The story is fast and superbly told, and the characters are likable and believable. --Cory Doctorow, New York Times best-selling author of Little Brother

Sometimes Living in the Big Apple Really Bites! Eighteen-year-old rock star Sam Lee isn't like other girls. She's the super-talented bass player and songwriter for an all-girl indie band and an incurable loner. Then one night after a concert in Central Park, she's attacked by a wild dog. Suddenly, this long-time vegetarian is craving meat--the bloodier, the better. Sam finds herself with an unbelievable secret and no one she trusts to share it. And so begin the endless lies to cover up the hairy truth...When a new girl gang appears in the city--with claws and paws--Sam suspects there's a connection to her own inner beast. Trapped in a tug-of-war between her animal and human selves, forced to choose between the guy who sparks her carnal appetite and the one who makes her feel like a normal teenage girl, Sam has to unravel the mysteries of the werewolf world before her bandmates, the media, and her mother catch up to her.

The third case in the compelling Boy Sherlock Holmes series is full of as many twists and turns as the backstreets of Victorian London.

When a wealthy young girl vanishes as if by magic in Hyde Park, Sherlock is once again driven to prove himself. In a heart-stopping race against time, an innocent boy's survival depends on Sherlock's ability to solve the mysterious puzzle of the Vanishing Girl. As complex as the maze that protects the missing girl's hiding place, this case takes Sherlock racing to the countryside, the coast, and into the lair of a menagerie of exotic, dangerous creatures.

Haunted by memories of his shattered family, goaded by his enemies, driven to heal the fragile relationship between him and the beautiful Irene Doyle, Sherlock makes an almost fatal mistake. In the end, his brilliant powers of deduction and the steadfast eccentric Sigerson Bell save the day. Soon, very soon, the world will come to know him as the master detective of all time.

Born with Down syndrome, Ruby Jean Sharp comes from a time when being a developmentally disabled person could mean growing up behind locked doors and barred windows and being called names like retard and moron. When Ruby Jean's caregiver and loving grandmother dies, her mother takes her to Woodlands School in New Westminster, British Columbia, and rarely visits.

As Ruby Jean herself says: Can't say why they called it a school -- a school's a place you go for learnin an then after you get to go home. I never learnt much bout ledders and numbers, an I sure never got to go home.

It's here in an institution that opened in 1878 and was originally called the Provincial Lunatic Asylum that Ruby Jean learns to survive isolation, boredom, and every kind of abuse. Just when she can hardly remember if she's ever been happy, she learns a lesson about patience and perseverance from an old crow.

The enthralling sequel to Me and the Blondes, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award

Life is almost ... well ... potentially perfect for Sophie Kandinsky. As it turns out, the Blondes were as dazzled by her as she was by them, and Sophie enters grade ten at Northern Heights smack in the centre of the power grid. There will be no more cascading lies and secrets from her, but the Blondes--now that's another story. And her eccentric Aunties are still peppering Sophie with their eccentric advice on life, love, and how to land the elusive Luke Pearson. But in the end, the best and biggest news is also the worst. After seven years, Sophie's beloved Papa is finally out of prison. Papa is home. Trouble is ... he's supposed to be dead. No more lies? No more secrets?

[Teresa Toten] writes with insight and compassion about the complex moral universe of adolescence.
-- Quill & Quire

Toten captures perfectly the easy camaraderie of girls who trust each other enough to play Truth or Dare and challenge each other to develop into good people.
--CM Magazine

David's younger sister Ivy, born with multiple disabilities, needs constant attention. She may be eleven years old, but in many ways she's still a baby. She embarrasses him in public. She takes all of their parents' focus, to the point where David wonders if they see him as anything more than a helper for Ivy. But despite it all, he loves her. The summer days are following their usual pattern of taking care of his sister, doing chores, and trips to the cottage. The one exception is Hannah, the new girl across the street. Hannah makes David feel anything but routine. He wants to be around her all the time. And, amazingly, she seems to be into him as well. Everything changes when Ivy has an accident while being looked after by her dad. As David wrestles with what happened to Ivy, he is forced to confront his own feelings of guilt, the meaning of mercy, and what can be forgiven.

Alex is seventeen years old and she feels her life has come to an end. After being involved in an accident that killed her best friend, she doesn't see why anyone would want her around and she refuses to talk. Ordered by a judge to do community service, she must spend time at a hospital with a girl named Joanie, who has minimal control of her body and no speech. Never having known another way of being, Joanie has an extraordinary internal life. She has been listening and watching as the world goes on around her, but Joanie is so full of words, thoughts and images that if she could ever figure out a way to let them loose, they would come swirling out in a torrent of syllables. She would fill every room with the colors of her dreams until the whole world became a rainbow of her making. Brought together by accident, Alex and Joanie have experienced the helplessness of silence. Their growing connection may lead them both to find the power of their voices.

In the wake of her mother's death, Lyssa Thomson flees her oppressive stepfather and heads for Halifax, intent on attending university and leaving her past behind. But things don't go as planned, and with nowhere to turn, she's forced to reconnect with her estranged stepbrother, Aidan. After finding some discarded medication, she quickly realizes all is not as it seems and that Aidan is not the person she remembers.

Winner, Commonwealth Book Prize, Canada and Europe, Frye Academy Award, and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Shortlisted, CLA Young Adult Book Award, Red Maple Award, and University of Canberra Book of the Year
Longlisted, IMPAC Dublin Award

Living with a weird brother in a small town can be tough enough. Having a spectacular fall through the ice at a skating party and nearly drowning are grounds for embarrassment. But having a vision and narrating it to the assembled crowd solidifies your status as an outcast.

What Ruby Carson saw during that fateful day was her entire town -- buildings and people -- floating underwater. Then an orange-tipped surveyor stake turns up in a farmer's field. Another is found in the cemetery. A man with surveying equipment is spotted eating lunch near Pokiok Falls. The residents of Haverton soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat.

Set in the 1960s, The Town That Drowned evokes the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home. Deftly written in a deceptively unassuming style, Nason's keen insights into human nature and the depth of human attachment to place make this novel ripple in an amber tension of light and shadow.

Winner of the 2003 Ann Connor Brimer Award, short-listed for the 2004 White Pine Award

Martin Emerson's family, friends, and even his therapist have trouble figuring him out. He never showed much of a reaction to the death of his mother, and his behaviour of late has been getting more and more bizarre.

And yet, his website -- Emerso.com -- has made him something of a cult figure to followers who believe that, if not having all the right answers, Emerso at least has all the right questions.

Shoulder the Sky is a rarity among young adult novels - it challenges the reader with philosophical thought and complex observations.