The Hidden Room

Life is good for Laurie and Martha. They have three great kids, a much-loved home in the countryside, and after years of struggle, Laurie's career as an architect is taking off at last. Everything's perfect. Except, it isn't. Someone is about to walk into their happy family and tear it apart. Laurie has been hiding from him for years. The question is, now that he's found her, can she keep her family safe? And just how far will she go to protect them?

`If not ``a shilling life'', a glance at Who's Who in Canada will give you all the facts. Which are more than impressive. P K Page, born in 1916 and very much with us is, in brief, a phenomenon; a force majeur in Canadian literary and artistic life; a National Treasure. Her work to date, sprung from the praiseworthy ambition of the lavishly gifted, bestows upon us rich decades of protean accomplishment, of widespread honour and renown. Let us however concern ourselves here with the essential fictions - with the beginning in delight and ending in wisdom, as Frost has it, of true poems; with this present testament of imaginative, intellectual and spiritual achievement: The Hidden Room: Collected Poems. `To immerse oneself in these two handsome volumes (elegantly complemented and informed throughout by the drawings and paintings of her ``twin sister, / beautiful as Euclid'', the painter P K Irwin) is to plunge into a deep-freighted, breaking wave of swirled delights and parlous undertows. It is, as with all such translucent ramparts of desire and abandon, best met head-on. This is not to say that one must read consecutively through the some four hundred and fifty pages of poetry and the one dangerous, liminal short story. The ordering of the volumes is credited to Stan Dragland, who ``tackled material spanning sixty years and threaded it together in a manner uniquely his own.'' While the overall drift is chronological, the poems have been so intelligently interwoven that each of the volumes is a realized entity, as each is a reflection of the whole.'

A classic mystery/detective story in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, the hidden room suggested by the title of this book does not remain a mystery for very long as the book progresses. Written in the first person, the husband of his (Carlton Davies) former lover is found dead one night at the stroke of midnight, and Davies finds his ex-lover standing over the dead body immediately after the shot was fired, with a gun in her hand. It was no secret that she never truly loved her husband, who had blackmailed her into marrying him. The jury ships Ruth to prison, and the stage is set for Davies to locate the right detective for the case, and for a series of events with twists and turns and surprises that will keep the reader guessing who was responsible for this murder.

This is a new release of the original 1942 edition.

From Edgar Award Winner Dori Hillestad Butler comes a new chapter book mystery series, The Treasure Troop! Join Marly, Sai, and Isla, three code-cracking kids on the hunt for an old neighbor's hidden treasure. In the second book of this code-busting series, Marly, Sai, and Isla are back on the hunt. After finding Mr. Summerling's hidden treehouse, they've discovered a new set of clues for them to follow, leading them straight to the heart of their mysterious neighbor's life: his house. The same house Marly has been living next to all of these years, which, they discover, is filled with hidden rooms and staircases. With just a few scraps of papers as clues, and Mr. Summerling's angry son on their tails, can the Treasure Troop find the answers they're looking for?

In a future where the Population Police enforce the law limiting a family to only two children, Luke, an illegal third child, has lived all his twelve years in isolation and fear on his family's farm in this start to the Shadow Children series from Margaret Peterson Haddix. Luke has never been to school. He's never had a birthday party, or gone to a friend's house for an overnight. In fact, Luke has never had a friend. Luke is one of the shadow children, a third child forbidden by the Population Police. He's lived his entire life in hiding, and now, with a new housing development replacing the woods next to his family's farm, he is no longer even allowed to go outside. Then, one day Luke sees a girl's face in the window of a house where he knows two other children already live. Finally, he's met a shadow child like himself. Jen is willing to risk everything to come out of the shadows—does Luke dare to become involved in her dangerous plan? Can he afford not to?

The Hidden Room is filled with treasure gathered from over five decades of some of the best poetry ever written in Canada. Almost all of the poetry P. K. Page has published in volume form is here, all the way from Unit of Five (1944) to Hologram (1994), together with a good many unpublished poems and poems hitherto published only in magazines, from all stages of her career. A section of luminous new poems completes the volume. Evening Dance of the Grey Flies and Hologram appear substantially as first published, though virtually every other section has undergone thoughtful reassessment by the author with the assistance of editor Stan Dragland. The Hidden Room is something more than simply a mechanical Collected. The inclusion of uncollected and new poems has demanded a re-choreographing, a reassortment of familiar poems into new families. The Hidden Room is quite possibly the best collection of verse ever published in this country. This is the essential, rather than the entire P. K. Page, a lifetime of work that any poet would be proud to call their own.

From Edgar Award Winner Dori Hillestad Butler comes a new chapter book mystery series, The Treasure Troop! Join Marly, Sai, and Isla, three code-cracking kids on the hunt for an old neighbor's hidden treasure. In the second book of this code-busting series, Marly, Sai, and Isla are back on the hunt. After finding Mr. Summerling's hidden treehouse, they've discovered a new set of clues for them to follow, leading them straight to the heart of their mysterious neighbor's life: his house. The same house Marly has been living next to all of these years, which, they discover, is filled with hidden rooms and staircases. With just a few scraps of papers as clues, and Mr. Summerling's angry son on their tails, can the Treasure Troop find the answers they're looking for?