PAPER CHASE: Brooks' novel getting notice in U.S.

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Martha Brooks (CP)

The newest novel by veteran Winnipeg writer Martha Brooks is garnering positive attention south of the border.

Queen of Hearts, published in 2010 by Toronto-based Groundwood Books, has been named a best book by the U.S. Board on Books for Young People and the Young Adult Library Services Association and has made the 2012 American Library Association Notable Children's Book List.

Brooks, the author of several award-winning YA titles, is thrilled. "Queen of Hearts lifts the veil on a largely misunderstood part of our own Manitoba history -- life in a tuberculosis sanatorium," she says. "I couldn't be more delighted that it is finding a wider audience who want to read about us!'"

The novel is about a young girl sent to stay at a southern Manitoba sanatorium in the 1940s. In Canada, Queen of Hearts was a finalist for the 2011 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award.

Brooks won the Governor General's Award for her 2002 youth novel, True Confessional of a Heartless Girl.

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Aqua Books has revealed one mystery, but will keep another until next week. Since the used book store's 2008 relocation to Garry Street (from Princess Street) until January, Winnipeg author Catherine Hunter secretly occupied one of its writing studios.

Hunter, whose last novel was Queen of Diamonds (2006), says she needs uninterrupted time to write, but that she's not comfortable simply asking people to go away. "That would be rude!" And so for four years, she "snuck in and out," and wrote in treasured solitude.

In August owner Kelly Hughes announced the bookstore and events hub would shut down current operations and be reborn as a non-profit organization. He will divulge the new location and date of opening on Wednesday.

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When Ste. Ambroise author Linda Ducharme's mother was terminally ill she said that if she were to write a novel, it would be about a young couple who moved to the North, and of the woman being assisted by a wolf.

For her mother, Ducharme wrote that book, and even gave it the title her mother chose: Spirit of the North. "I am hoping she would approve," she says.

This is Ducharme's second novel with Winnipeg's Pemmican Publications, with which she has also published two picture books. The launch for Spirit of the North will take place Wednesday, 7 p.m., at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

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As a child growing up on the Baker Hutterite colony near MacGregor, Johannes Waldner loved reading, but longed to read books about kids like him: Hutterite. That childhood wish, along with his love of hockey, inspired him to write his just published picture book, Playing Like Timothy.

He began writing the story as an assignment for a Brandon University creative writing course. "I wanted to base my story on a kid who plays hockey, and who lives on a Hutterite colony," he says, "so that both our favourite national pastime and some unique cultural aspects of our communities could be displayed in the same story."

Playing Like Timothy is available at McNally Robinson Booksellers, online through Amazon, and from the title's publisher, Hutterian Brethren Book Centre in MacGregor. A March launch will take place at McNally's.

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Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 11, 2012 J8