Alan Cumyn: 9 books

Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life...

Winner of the OLA's Forest of Reading Silver Birch Express Award Sylvia Tull -- the girl whose very glance turns Owen's face into a burning tomato -- has moved away from the small village where Owen lives with his parents and two brothers. But he still has the birthday gift she gave him --...

Nominated for the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award and the TD Children's Literature Award As the new school year unfolds, the magic of the Skye brothers' antic adventures is replaced by a different kind of magic — of stillness, when Owen visits the haunted...

After surviving a terrifying ordeal at the hands of terrorists in the South Pacific island of Santa Irene, Bill Burridge returns home to Ottawa and casts himself single-mindedly into building a human-rights organization to stand watch over the world’s most troubled areas. Yet, plagued by memories...

Stan is an intense sixteen-year-old loner who desperately wants to make the junior varsity basketball team. And it seems that he may be about to do so, until he's blindsided by the unexpected attentions of Janine Igwash. Suddenly Stan is no longer thinking about jump shots. Instead he is obsessed...

This high-interest, low-vocabulary novella is intended for adult basic education (ABE) and English as a Second Language (ESL) readers. Jess and Gregor live in a cold basement apartment. Gregor is a comedian who stacks chairs for a living. Jess is an actor who works in a restaurant. The sudden...

Prepare to be blown away—or rather, carried away on huge muscular wings—by this blissfully outlandish, bracingly smart, tour de force about a teen who has to come to terms with relinquishing control for the first time as she falls for the hot new…pterodactyl…at school. After all, everybody...

Winner of the Mr. Christie's Book Award and the Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award Owen Skye is skinny and quiet and has big ears. He does everything (just about) his older brother, Andy, says, while trying to stay one step ahead of little brother Leonard, who has now started school and...

Hatchet meets Maybe a Fox in this piercing novel about Edgar, a boy who has lost the ability to speak and can only bark, and his dog Benjamin as they travel through the freezing Yukon wilderness in order to stop Edgar’s mother from making a huge mistake. Eleven-year-old Edgar knows whenever...