Books with author John Fleming Wilson

A boy-friendly book set during World War One, published for the centennary of the war and accompanied by a digital component to boost interest from the school and library market. It's the early 1900s and Edward Setten is growing up in the prairies fascinated by his uncle, who is one of the very first people in Canada to pilot a plane. Despite his mother's protests, Edward learns to fly and, when war breaks out, joins the Royal Flying Corps. In this fast-paced and gripping novel, Edward's coming of age takes place in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

As a boy growing up in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, Dieter has been seduced by the pomp and circumstance of war. But as global hostilities intensify, he is called upon to fight for his country in a conflict that he doesn’t fully understand. Now he must run from everything he knows. With most of his family dead, Berlin in ruins, and the Russian army closing in, Dieter can no longer naïvely cling to his childhood beliefs. The world he is facing is brutal, dirty and unforgiving. And the most he can hope for is a chance to survive.

Steve thinks a trip to Europe is out of the question―until he hears his grandfather's will. Suddenly he's off to Spain, armed with only a letter from his grandfather that sends him to a specific address in Barcelona. There he meets a girl named Laia and finds a trunk containing some of his grandfather's possessions, including a journal he kept during the time he fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Steve decides to trace his grandfather's footsteps through Spain, and with Laia's help, he visits the battlefields and ruined towns that shaped his grandfather's young life, and begins to understand the power of history and the transformative nature of passion for a righteous cause. Steve's adventures start in The Missing Skull, part of The Seven Prequels and continue in Broken Arrow, part of The Seven Sequels.

Howard is a lonely, geeky tenth-grader dealing with a father who's had some kind of breakdown, a flaky, overprotective mother and frightening waking dreams. Then he meets Cate, a strange girl who convinces him that he is an Adept, which means he can communicate through dreams with other dimensions and, under certain circumstances, travel between them. Howard discovers that our world is only one of several dimensions swirling in time and space, and that one of the others, peopled by unimaginably powerful monsters, is approaching Earth for the first time in millennia. The last time the dimensions coincided, our world was saved by the breaking of a powerful golden mask in the Chinese city of Sanxingdui. Together, Howard and Cate travel through time and space, meeting other Adepts and avoiding lurking monsters, in a quest to find the three fragments of the golden mask and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

A trip to a remote lake in northern Ontario with his grandfather doesn't thrill Steve, especially since his twin brother, DJ, was taken to Central America. Matters start to look up when his grandfather tells Steve about the mysterious death of the artist Tom Thomson and sets him the task of finding Thomson's missing skull. Steve loves mysteries, but when odd things begin happening and strange people start threatening him, Steve wonders whether this is part of his grandfather's plan. Is this still a simple puzzle, or is something far more sinister going on?In this thrilling prequel to Lost Cause and Broken Arrow, the history- and mystery-loving Steve ends up in remote northern Ontario.

The Caught in Conflict Collection is an imprint of fast-paced, historically accurate, morally-complex quick reads for Adults and Teens. They can be read in any order.Nate MacGregor knows he must fight for his Southern homeland in the coming Civil War, but for his cousin Walt in Canada West it's not so simple. Walt knows slavery's wrong but, as the tensions increase and war breaks out, the danger of Britain, and Canada, being sucked into the conflict on the side of the Confederacy increases. The two cousins are linked by Sunday, an escaped slave who is using the Underground Railroad to escape from Nate's plantation and get to Canada. As the war gathers momentum, Walt, Nate and Sunday are drawn farther and farther in, until they arrive at a shattering conclusion during the battle of Shiloh. "…action-filled, tightly written prose. Realistic battle scenes illustrate the senselessness of war…the story offers a fresh take on the conflict - the idea of Canada as refuge for fugitive slaves and the irony of how it was nearly drawn into the war on the side of the South."- Albany Public Library, NYWilson "…makes sure that each character is well-rounded, with interesting sides to tell in the story…Easy to read, yet based on historical facts, this book takes the Civil War period in history from a dry read based on statistics, to a real situation being played out on both sides of the 49th Parallel. The impassioned beliefs and actions of people on both sides of the conflict captures the interest and makes the horrors of war real.It was so well-written that I was drawn in immediately, and I usually avoid anything to do with war…History can be interesting."-Susan Miller, Resource Links"Wilson takes a hard look at war and its consequences through the eyes of young protagonists…(he) provides his usual challenge to black-and-white thinking, prodding readers to think critically. Heroes are hard to come by in this historical fiction, and ethical choices are as difficult to determine as they are to make."-Quill & Quire

The Caught in Conflict Collection is an imprint of fast-paced, historically accurate, morally-complex quick reads for Adults and Teens. They can be read in any order.Over the course of a single night in 1945, in a ditch by the flickering light of a burning Tiger tank, a young German soldier tells his life story to a wounded Canadian. Growing up in Germany in the 1930s, Dieter has been seduced by the pomp and propaganda of the Nazis. Now, having seen battle and having discovered the evils his countrymen are capable of, the best he can hope for is survival."…a though-provoking novel about the experiences of war." CCBN"…a compelling and thoughtful story of war that should appeal to a wide range of readers." Q&Q

Fifteen-year-old Jim Hay believes that war is a glorious adventure and cannot wait for his turn to fight. But as his father marches off to battle in August 1914, Jim must be content to record his thoughts and dreams in his journal. All too quickly, however, Jim’s life begins to unravel. His father is killed in action, his mother suffers a breakdown, and when Jim does at last join up, it is as much to find refuge as it is to seek glory. In the trenches of France, his romantic views of war are dispelled, and his longing for adventure is replaced by a basic need to survive.