Best Selling Books by Alan Cumyn

Wanting to keep in touch with his first love, Sylvia, aspiring writer Owen Skye composes a number of letters to tell her about the new life he is living so far away, but fear of his inadequacy as a writer keeps him from sending them and so he must find the courage deep within to perform this final step in the process.

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 is becoming smart at an alarming pace. The Skye brothers live in a small rural village with their parents and weird Uncle Lorne, an eccentric and painfully shy bachelor who sleeps on a cot in the basement, takes out his teeth at night and embodies Owen''s worst fears about becoming a grownup. On his way home from hockey practice one evening, Owen catches a glimpse of a girl named Sylvia at her piano lesson, and he falls hopelessly in love. Thank goodness for life at home, where there are brothers to talk to and plot adventures with. Yet the Skye boys somehow have a knack for turning every innocent plan into a full-scale ordeal.

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 house in the dead of winter, and of insight, as he begins to see his father in a new light. Owen is growing up, but happily for readers, he never loses his most endearing qualities — his sweet vulnerability, his impulsive courage, and his imagination as big as the sky. The Secret Life of Owen Skye was a smash hit with readers, reviewers and award juries. In After Sylvia, Alan Cumyn has produced a captivating sequel that captures perfectly the bewilderment and joy of being a kid. A funny, poignant, magical book that will delight a broad range of readers.

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, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who tweaks into florescence a long-harboured, secret sexual fetish. Then add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother, a shy night prowler, and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate. Poignant and gritty, tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as a delicious blend of darkness and humour as it embraces the surprising emotional connections that are made in the midst of life’s madness.

When imaginative sixteen-year-old Stan''s simple dreams of making the JV basketball team fall through, he finds himself aware of the unexpected attention of mysterious Janine Igwash, just as his father and four-year-old half brother arrive on the scene.

Hatchet meets Maybe a Fox in this “gripping, suspenseful” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) 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’s mom is making him move. Again. This time, they’re headed to a tiny town in the Yukon called Dawson, Alaska. For once, though, Edgar is excited. They’ll be housesitting, and with the house comes a dog: Benjamin. It’s love at first sight when Edgar first spies the massive Newfoundland, and soon Edgar starts liking lots of other things about Dawson. But just as soon, he starts noticing things. The kinds of things his mom did before; the kinds of things that caused them to move so much. The kinds of things that will surely, absolutely cause them to move again. Unless he can warn the people who are about to be hurt. Yet just when Edgar needs his voice most…it’s gone. Suddenly, he can’t communicate with anyone but Benjamin. So, with the dog by his side, Edgar embarks on a dangerous journey across the frozen Yukon River in search of answers—and a way to keep his mother from upturning their lives all over again. But the wilderness is not kind. Edgar and Benjamin find themselves in a situation right out of Edgar’s favorite Jack London story. With cracking ice, freezing water, bone-chilling temperatures, and looming, lurking wolves, Edgar must find a way to survive before he can stop his mother from wrecking everything.

A Canadian soldier who has fought at Ypres is granted a ten day leave in London that forces him to defend his own honour and confront his own doubts about his actions.

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 wants him! Shiels is very pleased with her perfectly controlled life (controlling others while she’s at it). She’s smart, powerful, the Student Body Chair, and she even has a loving boyfriend. What more could a girl ask for? But everything changes when the first-ever interspecies transfer student, a pterodactyl named Pyke, enrolls at her school. There’s something about him—something primal—that causes the students to lose control whenever he’s around. Even Shiels, the seemingly perfect self-confident girl that she is, can’t keep her mind off of him, despite her doting boyfriend and despite the fact that Pyke immediately starts dating Jocelyn, the school’s fastest runner who Shiels has always discounted as a nobody. Pyke, hugely popular in a school whose motto is to embrace differences, is asked to join a band, and when his band plays at the Autumn Whirl dance, his preternatural shrieking music sends everyone into a literal frenzy. No one can remember what happened the next day, but Shiels learns that she danced far too long with Pyke, her nose has turned purple, and she may have done something with her boyfriend that she shouldn’t have. Who’s in control now? Hilarious and relatable, Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend is about a teen who must come to terms with not being in control of all things at all times, break free of her mundane life, discover who her true self is, and, oh, find out that going primal isn’t always a bad thing.

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 of his incarceration and by the strain of his disintegrating marriage, he is a man struggling to hold his life together. When a democratic revolution stands Santa Irene on a knife-edge between chaos and healing, Burridge reluctantly agrees to serve on a Truth Commission there to investigate past atrocities. Taut, intelligent, and written in the compelling, often sardonic voice of Bill Burridge, Cumyn’s gripping novel immerses us in a shadowy world of betrayals and shifting loyalties, and reveals the intricate, rejuvenating bonds of human relationships. Bill Burridge’s voice is infectious, his story a remarkable one as the novel builds to its climactic final scenes.

Winner, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award Shortlisted, Trillium Award Man of Bone has a thriller''s taste for blood, but Alan Cumyn delivers something more: a heart-wrenching portrait of an ordinary Canadian jerked into third-world terrorism. Bill Burridge, his wife and their little son have moved to the "island paradise" of Santa Irene on Bill''s first diplomatic posting. At the short-staffed embassy, he is thrown, almost unbriefed, into work he scarcely understands. After less than two weeks, while driving alone on a "safe" highway to an afternoon of badminton in the country, he is snatched by revolutionaries. Against his will, Burridge turns out under torture to be a "man of bone" who can''t give up and die. His ignorance and low status make him useless to his captors, but they can''t simply let him go. They continue to torture him until, distracted by other battles, they abandon him and his keeper in a mountain village. Suddenly one day helicopters rake the village with gunfire, and the whole situation turns upside down. Alan Cumyn is well known for creating men with tender hearts and iron wills. Bill Burridge, angry at God for making him live, keeps his wits by remembering his and Maryse''s courtship and marriage and their life with young Patrick. Although he isolates this part of himself from his torturers, he and his beloved family discover when he returns to Ottawa, barely alive, that "living happily ever after" will be more complex than they could have imagined.

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 death of their close friend, Peter, forces them to think about their lives. They stay up all night talking, loving, arguing. Gregor lives for the moment, the next smile. Jess wants to make plans. This is their night of truth. Who are they? What do they want? What do they mean to each other? Will Peter''s death mark the end of Jess and Gregor''s life together?A perfect book choice for new readers.

A father''s untimely death, a gothic grandfather who falls in love with his son''s beautiful widow, a mysterious girl, a rogue golfer, and the watchful eyes of two young people trying to overcome the quirky gravity of their own families -- these are the unlikely elements in this lyrical, funny, romantic novel.

Nominated for the Ottawa Book Award 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 with Janine''s spiky hair, her milky white shoulders and the mysterious little tattoo at the base of her neck, not to mention the heat of her breath, her dark eyes, wide hips and ... Then Stan''s father arrives on the scene with Stan''s four - year - old half brother, and things become truly insane. "Tilt" is a wonderfully droll and insightful story about a sensitive, intelligent and gently funny young man living through an impossibly absurd time of life. This book is a rare achievement - a witty, sexy compulsively readable work of high literary quality.

In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Alan Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. It is those memories that literally save his life and keep him from a cold grave in a foreign land. Upon his return home to Montreal, Crome seeks the nourishment of body and soul, sometimes impulsively, after years of torture and deprivation. He meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. To her they are obscenities and provoke the bitter taste of jealousy. The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn''s most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man''s hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing.

While Teachers'' College officials argue over him, Rudy Seaborn waits nervously in an antiquated limousine. As he stares through the windows at the strange sights surrounding him, a curious crowd stares back at the foreigner who has come to Laozhou to teach English. Home in Canada a year later, Rudy is still caged by cross-cultural differences as he waits for Li Ming, his banished translator and lover, to arrive. The unrest that explodes in Tiananmen Square grips Rudy in Canada as he waits for Li Ming''s visa, waits for a friend''s baby to be born, waits and still waits for Li Ming.

This collection includes All Night, Bed and Breakfast, The Clear-Out, and Love You to Death.