Winner of the 2002 Anna Pidruchney Award For New Writers On a visit to Ukraine to retrieve a family heirloom secretly buried by his grandfather during the Second World War, Yaroslaw, a Ukrainian-Canadian university student, stumbles into a world full of spies and secret organizations, peril and political intrigue. His discovery of the hidden cache yields clues to the location of a fabled lost treasure-the greatest in all Europe. Working against time, Yaroslaw and a small band of accomplices struggle to uncover and save a nation’s heritage, operating in secret to prevent the corrupt leaders of the government and the Russians-from stealing it. Yaroslaw’s Treasure is a thrilling suspense story set against the gripping drama of the Orange Revolution, the 2004 popular uprising that saw hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in Ukraine to overthrow a corrupt government and reinforce democracy in a land long occupied by repressive and foreign regimes. Rich with history, romance, politics, and danger, Yaroslaw’s Treasure superbly captures the wonders and horrors of Ukraine’s past, swirls through the treacherous currents of its present politics, all the while providing entertainment as a first-rate thriller.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer's spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world's first weapon of mass destruction– and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably.

Leo's penchant for exploring lands him in trouble at school until he uses his mapping skills on a class field trip to prove he really can be responsible.

Set in the harsh desert world of the Arizona Territory and northern Mexico during the 1870s, Written in Blood follows young Jim Doolen as he attempts to find some trace of the father who abandoned his family ten years earlier. As he travels through a scorched landscape very different from the lush West Coast forests of his home, Jim crosses paths with an assortment of intriguing characters, including an Apache warrior, a cave-dwelling mystic, an old Mexican revolutionary and a mysterious cowboy. And with each encounter he learns something more of the strange world he has entered and adds one more link in a chain that leads back to his father-and back to a dark, violent past. As his story approaches its thrilling conclusion in a ruined Mexican hacienda, Jim comes to realize that his father's life was much more complex than he had imagined, and that, in discovering his past, he has opened the way to his future.

Writing Our Way Home is an important contribution to literary studies. “Italian-Canadian writers are not just Canadian writers, but world writers,” states literary critic Elena Lamberti in the introduction to Writing Our Way Home. “They write from Canada with an original point of view on multiple (hybrid) identities and have something to tell the whole world …” A unique volume of creative and critical texts, Writing Our Way Home features contributors from Canada, Italy and the United States: Annalisa Bonomo, John Calabro, Michele Campanini, Licia Canton, Maria Giuseppina Cesari, Pietro Corsi, Domenic Cusmano, Marisa De Franceschi, Mike Dell'Aquila, Alberto Mario DeLogu, Delia De Santis, Gil Fagiani, Nino Famà, Venera Fazio, Frank Giorno, Gabriella Iacobucci, Elena Lamberti, Maria Lisella, Ernesto Livorni, Darlene Madott, Michael Mirolla, Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni, Linda Morra, Oriana Palusci, Gianna Patriarca, Maria Cristina Seccia, Maria Tognan, Osvaldo Zappa, Jim Zucchero.

After ten years of marriage, Sue and Jerry would say they know everything about each other. But each harbours a significant secret. When Jerry becomes ill and it’s apparent he’s dying, Sue visits a psychic, Hans, who tells her there is someone like a son in her life. She dismisses this, but at Jerry’s funeral his son turns up—a son Sue didn’t know existed.  At first Sue feels betrayed by Jerry, but gradually she accepts her own complicity. And she regrets never telling him, or anyone else, about the baby girl she gave up for adoption when she herself was only sixteen. Encouraged by Hans and a relative of Jerry’s, Sue starts looking for her daughter and relying more on Hans, who is also struggling with troubles in his own marriage. The novel deals with family secrets, social issues, relationships, and psychic insight. It confronts what happened when pregnancies were kept secret many years ago, what happens when mother and birth child look for and either find, or do not find, each other. It also explores the reality of family secrets, huge issues that are kept quiet under the veneer of polite society and that affect the individuals and families involved for lifetimes, even generations. The novel also raises the question of who is family and how do we create one.

An old record player; an unposted letter; a pearl necklace never purchased; a badly written poem from the woman you love: tokens, gifts, and objects lost or left behind, desired or not wanted at all are the starting points for the stories in 'Worldly Goods', a new collection by Alice Petersen. The stories reveal that ownership is more than possession, for Petersen shows how small objects stand as markers of our attempts to communicate with each other.

Josiah Hensons life is an epic tale of one mans battle against evil and ignorance. By the time he was six, Josiah had been sold three times. When he was nine, his familys owner beat him for trying to learn to read. In spite of his physical pain and emotional heartache, he never lost the sense of morality that was his bedrock. After his escape, Josiah became an advocate for those still in bondage. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, he led 118 slaves to safety in Canada. Working for Freedom is the story of a man who proved that one person can make a difference in defending and promoting human rights.

It’s late 1969 and Communist China has successfully launched its first satellite. Inspired by this feat, a group of college students in Laguna Beach, California, set out to put their own satellite into orbit in homage to the recent Woodstock Festival.A young Canadian graduate student at the University of California finds himself at the centre of the mayhem when he and his friends break into a mothballed missile silo and commandeer everything they need, including a nuclear warhead, to blast the Woodstock Nation into the space age. The activists have big plans for their loot, schemes that may well culminate in the Light Show to End All Light Shows in the Nevada desert.An extraordinary black comedy shot full of the social and political issues of the time, Woodstock Rising is a coming-of-age tale couched in free love, rock anthems, and revolution as well as a chronicle of an era whose causes continue to speak to us.