Banjo of Destiny

Nominee for the 2012 Silver Birch Express Award in the Ontario Library Association's Forest of Reading Program. Jeremiah Birnbaum is stinking rich. He lives in a house with nine bathrooms, a games room, an exercise room, an indoor pool, a hot tub, a movie theater, a bowling alley and a tennis court. His parents, a former hotdog vendor and window cleaner who made it big in dental floss, make sure Jeremiah goes to the very best private school, and that he takes lessons in all the things he will need to know how to do as an accomplished and impressive young man: etiquette lessons, ballroom dancing, watercolor painting. And, of course, classical piano. Jeremiah complies, because he wants to please his parents. But one day, by chance, he hears the captivating strains of a different kind of music the strums, plucks and rhythms of a banjo. It is music that stirs something in Jeremiah's dutiful little soul, and he is suddenly obsessed. And when his parents forbid him to play one, he decides to learn anyway even if he has to make the instrument himself.

Cary Fagan is an award-winning children's author who is known for his timeless, quirky and deceptively simple stories that reveal complex and universal themes. He has also written several adult novels and has been an editor and contributor to several magazines and newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette. His work has won the City of Toronto Book Award and the Jewish Book Committee Prize for Fiction, and he has been a finalist for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario. Selçuk Demirel was born in Artvin, Turkey, in 1954. He moved to Paris in 1978 and still lives there.