Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret—a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.
Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton—back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.
Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs—even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.
Shoot Me
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie’s banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery.
Shoot Me is a story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are. Bestselling author Lesley Crewe has created a mixed-up, frantic, ultimately lovable East Coast family. But as Aunt Hildy would say, “Life is not something that needs to be tamed. It’s messy. Always was, always will be.”
Brighten the Corner Where You Are A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95In this bittersweet novel inspired by the life of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, master storyteller Carol Bruneau gives voice to the artist, allowing her to speak from beyond the grave, freed from the stigmas of gender, poverty and disability that marked her life and shaped her art.
Are You Kidding Me?! Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95For the first time, sixteen years’ worth of Cape Bretoner Lesley Crewe’s finest newspaper columns are collected in one place. The bestselling novelist, columnist and humorist employs a sharp, versatile wit, anchored by a tender centre, to bring readers laughter and tears. Crewe celebrates life, and all its warts, in this side-splitting, heartwarming collection.
A Forest for Calum
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The story is Roddie’s. The stage is his guardian and grandfather Calum’s. A quiet and stoic man, Calum Gillies and his aging friends illuminate for us the changing world around them: the loss of the coal mines, the labour strife and lean years endured, the religious parochialism that divides families and communities and, most important, a disappearing language. The setting is Cape Breton; the themes of cultural and rural change and decline are universal.
Use Your Imagination!
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95A woman becomes obsessed with a story about her family from 1890—when a naked, mute girl stumbled onto their property—and whether or not it really happened. A self-help guru and his chief strategist take their most affluent and unstable clients on a harrowing nature hike that destroys their company. A young convict in a prison creative writing class chronicles the rise and fall of his cellblock’s resident peacemaker. A rural neighbourhood becomes obsessed by the coming of a strange and powerful new homeowner who is in the middle of reinventing herself.
The stories of Use Your Imagination! are about stories, about the way we define and give shape to ourselves through all kinds of narratives, true or not. In seven long stories, Kris Bertin examines the complex labyrinth of lies, delusions, compromise, and fabrication that makes up our personal history and mythology. Sometimes funny, strange, or frightening, these stories represent Bertin’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed, award-winning debut, Bad Things Happen.
Anne of Green Gables : The Original Manuscript
Editor: Carolyn Strom CollinsPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95This fascinating book presents the original text of Montgomery’s most famous manuscript, including where the author scribbled notes, made additions and deletions, and other editorial details. L. M. Montgomery scholar Carolyn Strom Collins offers a rare look into Montgomery’s creative process, providing a never-before-published version of the worldwide phenomenon.
This book differs from previous versions of Anne in that it provides a transcription of the text and notes from Montgomery’s original manuscript, and shows how they were integrated to form the full novel. The culmination of years of research, Anne of Green Gables: the Original Manuscript is a necessary addition to any Montgomery lover’s collection. This volume features scans of the first page of each chapter from the original archived document (showing editorial notes in Montgomery’s handwriting) and an appendix of rare foreign-language covers.
A Dark House & Other Stories
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Snap decisions, risky alliances and comical wrong-headedness bring the stories in award-winning author Ian Colford’s latest collection to life. Colford weaves wit and nuance into portrayals of characters facing questions of fortune, fate and self-preservation. Awkward and dangerous situations arise as Colford, dryly yet empathetically, illustrates what happens when people do what they think is best for all.
Making it Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Tinker Gordon doesn’t want anything to change. He thinks that if he holds on tightly enough, his family, his tiny Cape Breton Island community, his very world will stay exactly the way it has always been. But explosions large and small—a world away, in the Middle East, in the land of opportunity in western Canada, and in his own home in Falkirk Cove—threaten to turn everything Tinker has ever known upside down.
Set variously in the heart of rural Cape Breton, on the war-torn streets of Aleppo and in a Turkish refugee camp, in the new wild west frontier of the Alberta oil patch, and in a tiny apartment in downtown Toronto, Tinker’s family, friends, and neighbours new and old must find a way to make it home.
In her adult fiction debut, Alison DeLory ponders a question as relevant in Atlantic Canada as anywhere in the world: where and how do we belong, and what does it take to make it home?
A Soldier’s Place
$19.95For two decades following the First World War, Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity—until now.
Carefully curated by author and editor Thomas Hodd, A Soldier’s Place is an anthology of fifteen of Bird’s best combat stories, based on the experiences of himself and of others, covering all aspects of the war effort and following brave Canadian, American, and Australian soldiers.
An infantry soldier, Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and became one of the most prolific Canadian authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works.
Winter Atlantic Canadian Stories
Editor: Dan SoucoupPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Some Canadians greet winter with a cold shoulder, while others celebrate the snow and ice. One thing we can all agree on: winter brings ideal reading weather. Spanning decades, this collection from author and anthology editor Dan Soucoup (The Finest Tree) shares the inherent warmth of the chilly season in a uniquely Atlantic Canadian way–with grit, good humour, and moving sentimentality.
From Thomas Raddall’s 1910 story of a young widow lost in a snowstorm on a frozen river to Alden Nowlan’s retelling of a Mi’kmaw legend about a man who loathed winter, these stories explore every face–good and bad–of the wintry season. A blend of fact and fiction spanning the region, from Labrador to Yarmouth, Winter: Atlantic Canadian Stories brings voices old and new together to celebrate the season of natural storytelling.
Mister Nightingale
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95When self-described mid-list Newfoundland author James Nightingale makes a brief sojourn to his St. John’s home for the re-release of his seminal novel, he’s forced to confront his failings, both familial and artistic. Imbued with the language of literature and the imagery of a Newfoundland in flux, Mister Nightingale is at once a fitful meditation on the writing life, and a keen and poignant exploration of one man’s coming to terms with la vie quotidienne.
Charting the Darkness
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95American-born fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran, Nick Sullivan, is a broken man. Abandoned for dead by his family while he rotted in a Viet Cong prison camp, Sullivan finds solace in alcohol and flashbacks to war and prison.
The death of a nearly forgotten uncle takes Sullivan to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he had spent many adolescent summers with his family and all that such a privilege entailed – beaches, fishing and first loves. His uncle’s bequest takes Nick by surprise and, in the process of refurbishing a salvaged sailboat, he too is salvaged.
Immortal Air
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Bright and promising as a student, George Cameron was sent to live with his sister in Boston while he attended a prestigious Latin school and later the Boston School of Law. It was what his mother wanted for him and his brother, Charley. It was what any well-bred family would want for an intelligent son destined for greater things than his humble New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, upbringing. On his journey to find his voice among the great poets of the 19th century, George had to leave behind his first love, a muse who haunted his thoughts and fuelled his passion for poetry throughout his life.
Law clerk, journalist, poet, George’s life often seemed to fall short of the dreams of fame he secreted in his private journals, yet his poetry remained ever-present in a mind churning with words and feeling.
George Cameron teamed up with Oscar Telgmann to write the longest-running Canadian opera. Leo: The Royal Cadet. It was his steadfast brother Charley who shared George’s work in the posthumous publication of Lyrics on Freedom, Love and Death.
Tinker and Blue A Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95At age 19 and 20, respectively, Tinker Dempsey and his oldest friend Blue figured it was time they followed generations of Cape Bretoners and crossed the Canso Causeway, if for no other reason than to find a few stories they could call their own when their wandering ways brought them back home. It had been Blue’s idea to drive their fourth-hand 1957 push-button Plymouth out to San Francisco to look at those Haight-Ashbury types.
Hitch-hiking hippies and homespun humour and wisdom, love troubles and trouble with the law – Tinker and Blue’s California adventures are a funny and poignant flashback.
The Innocent And Other Stories
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95Including Sheldon Currie’s guide and thoughtful introduction, The Innocent and Other Writings is another in a series of Breton Books by and about Legendary Cape Bretoners. Tessie Gillis ranks as the Godmother of Cape Breton Fiction–the first woman to dare write about the darker side of rural Cape Breton and the challenges and strategies for surviving and creating a compassionate and enduring community. Tenderness and insight are fundamental threads through all her writings.
This new collection is an essential sampler of Tessie Gillis’s writing, including “The Innocentt”, “The Day the Men Went to Town,” a beautiful portion of “The Last Chapter But One,” and much more. These are lasting stories for today.
Local Hero 20 New Short Stories from Cape Breton Island
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95This superb collection introduces Carmel Mikol and Hector MacNeil and Sue McKay Miller within a solid blend of noted writers including Carol Bruneau, Clive Doucet and Maureen Hull. From country life to city, on Cape Breton Island and away, here are Tim Vassallo and Leacock Award winner Bill Conall, Teresa O’Brien, Ellison Robertson and the comic genius of Julie Curwin and Larry Gibbons. Victor Sakalauskas and Dave Doucette portray children in harrowing, breathtaking circumstances, and the realism of D.C. Troicuk, Joyce Rankin, Ruth Schneider, David Muise, and Jigs Gardner deliver exquisite stories from life. Poignant, comic, powerful and heart-wrenching, Local Hero is marvelous evidence of Cape Breton’s place inlasting Canadian literature.
Cape Breton Book of the Night (Expanded Edition) Tales of Tenderness and Terror
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95THE EXPANDED EDITION from over 25 years of Cape Breton’s Magazine. This book offers a tough, caring presentation of extraordinary experience.
God’s Country Cape Breton Stories, Classic and Rare
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95Cape Breton Island continues to earn its place at the table of Canadian literature. God’s Country offers an essential collection of classic stories that helped build that award-winning reputation, as well as several rare and harder-to-find stories that maintain the growing respect while pointing toward future literary achievements. This is a lasting book that works for both bedside reading and the high school and university classroom. In God’s Country you’ll find stories by Alistair MacLeod, Joan Clark, Lynn Coady, D.R. MacDonald, Silver Donald Cameron, D.C. Troicuk, Sheldon Currie and many more — gathered under one rich and attractive roof. And these classic writers are only some of the authors this new volume has to share.
Wake of the Aspy A Novel of Northern Cape Breton
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95Teeming with life and remembrance, Wake of the Aspy is a novel of family, passion, and the beauty of memory’s heart.The coastal steamer Aspy connected northern Cape Breton to the world. It was a lifeline, an escape route, and a threat to the old ways. Rooted in a woman’s hard-won independence, Stewart Donovan’s terrific, often hilarious storytelling—the sounds and rhythm and acid wit of daily life—faces with vitality the local life and its encounters with government and a tourism future. Despite expropriations, war, cutbacks and social injustice aimed at driving them out, these are survivors you still might be lucky enough to meet Down North.
The Keys
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95Theresa O’Brien was born in Ireland and writes in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. This compelling first collection presents O’Brien as an accomplished storyteller.
As True As I’m Sittin Here
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$17.95The wit and good humour—ghost tales-comebacks and outrageous happenings—over 200 Cape Breton stories by 34 storytellers, collected by Archie Neil Chilsholm.
The Story So Far
Publisher: Breton Books$12.95These stories take the reader from the sparse, tense writing of the prequel to Glace Bay Miner’s Museum, through the author’s other stories drawn from his Cape Breton home. A critically acclaimed success.
Glace Bay Miner’s Museum
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95In a colliery town, sirens from the mine can mean cave-ins, explosions, or, as in the Westray disaster, sudden death.Sheldon Currie, author of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum was born in Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, and judging by the headlong intensity of this novel, he still hears those sirens.The story begins as shy, awkward Margaret MacNeil meets a strapping miner named Neil Currie. She’s already had her father and a brother die in the coalpits, but she hopes that Neil will be more lucky.
