Mr. Christie's Book Award - 12 years & up

At 15, Rhan Van is a kid with a foot in two worlds. As RanVan, the powerful knight of the video arcade game Stormers, he moves in a world of endless tunnels and insect-like attackers. Here, if he plays well and masters the rules, he can save the Princess from the Dark Lord and justice will be done.

After discovering that she has a twenty-four-year-old half-sister, twelve-year-old Megan finds the well-defined edges of her life disappearing into confusion.

While on an expedition with his father to get lumber to take back to Greenland, Thrand is captured by the native Osweet, who have taken him to replace one of their own who was killed by a Greenlander.

In 1895, to escape his violent father, Mickey is sent to stay with his Uncle Ronald and his twin aunts in the hills north of Ottawa and learns to feel safe for the first time in his life.

When a newborn bat named Shade but sometimes called "Runt" becomes separated from his colony during migration, he grows in ways that prepare him for even greater journeys.

The son of a Jewish father and black mother, high school senior Zack has never been allowed to meet his mother's family, but after doing a research project on a former slave, he travels from his home in Canada to Natchez, Mississippi to find his grandfather.

Forced out of his home by a disagreeable and bullying stepfather, sixteen-year-old Laker moves to another town and strikes up an unexpected friendship with a frail but determined old man.

In the year 2368, humans exist under dire environmental conditions and one young woman, rescued from a workcamp and chosen for a special duty, uses her love of learning to discover the truth about the planet's future and her own dark past.

Eleven-year-old Robert is the only one who can help when a mysterious stranger arrives, performing tricks and promising to bring rain, at the same time children begin to disappear from a dust bowl farm town in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.

It is 1924. Sadie and her little sister, Flora, are struggling with the challenges of a new school, a new town and a life without their parents. They used to live in Canada, but then their mother died and their father decided to try his luck prospecting for gold in the interior of Newfoundland. With no home of their own, Sadie and Flora must stay in a cold, grim boarding house in St. John's, owned by the stern Mrs. Hatch.

Sadie tries hard to provide her sister with love and stability, but it's an uphill struggle. The girls at Bishop Spencer School for Girls are mean to Sadie, partly because she is a foreigner from Canada, and partly because she is smart and does well in her classes. And although she makes a new friend-Teddy, whom she met when her family stayed at the hotel his parents run-theirs is a different kind of friendship, one that Sadie finds difficult to navigate.

Sadie's world is rocked when her father stops writing to her and, more crucially, stops sending money to Mrs. Hatch. Terrified that something has happened to her father, and well aware she and Flora may be sent to an orphanage, Sadie quickly learns that everything depends on her.

With The Word for Home, award-winning author Joan Clark has created a moving novel about one girl's search for friendship, love and security, and the place her search leads her-a place called home.