When he was choosing the twenty stories that make up Boys' Own, Tim Wynne-Jones thought about what happens in the Boys Zone: "champs and bullies, the lure of danger, getting lost in the wild, scoring the winning goal, scaring the pants off your brother." He turned to some of Canada's best writers for young people — including Brian Doyle, William Belle and Martha Brooks — and found all those themes reflected in their stories, and plenty more besides.

From Julie Johnston's vivid depiction of a mid-19th-century farm boy to Monica Hughes's tale of a Second World War teenaged soldier dodging gunfire on a French beach to Diana Wieler's story of a contemporary warrior in a Vancouver video arcade, these tales hum and crackle with life.

The stories range in time from 1000 A.D. to the present, but all the characters, whether white, native or from immigrant families, are instantly recognizable as real boys living real lives. They play hockey and Nintendo, they go to school, do chores, face initiation tests of one sort or another and sometimes they even see ghosts — all the while trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in. There are laughs and heartaches along the way, for them and for the lucky readers of Boys' Own.