Talk About the Valley
Editor: Hilary SircomPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Talk about the Valley is the second book of charming essays by Norman Creighton, whose name is a household word in the Annapolis Vally of Nova Scotia. Norman lived on Avon Street in Hansport, where his keen insight into Valley life, his wry sense of humour, and his obvious love of the natural world provided ample material for his weekly CBC radio broadcasts during the 1960s and 70s.
This engaging collection-selected from some 600 talks aired on CBC’s “A.M. Chronicle”, “Maritime Magazine” and “Radio Noon”-are the places in the Valley, the people who have lived there, and their way of life. It is beautifully illustrated by Normkan’s older brother Alan, himself a poet, writer and accomplished artist.
Till Death Do Us Part- A Screenplay
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$18.95Marie MacDonald dutifully followed her husband to Washington from small town Maine. It was a move that should have transformed her young Congressman husband, but instead it was Marie who was transformed.
Forced to return Maine after her husband’s brain aneurysm, something had indeed changed, and it wasn’t Maine. Keeping up appearances can sometimes last forever. Just not in this case.
Spoonhandle
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95Spoonhandle, Ruth Moore’s second novel, spent 14 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List and was made into the movie Deep Waters. Spoonhandle is about Maine, brilliantly authentic, but the story told is universal, as old as time as it deals with the struggle between love and meanness of spirit, between human dignity and greed.
The Weir
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95Ruth Moore’s classic tale of Maine islanders who feud, gossip and struggle while being battered by the relentless tides of change sweeping over their community and their entire way of life.
Blue Summer
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95A riveting coming-of-age novel told in retrospect by a washed-out taxi-driving musician from Baxter, Maine, who must come to terms with his past by returning to Maine and confronting the secrets and violence in his family.
Random Act
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95A senseless murder seems like a random act of violence, until it doesn’t.
Mapping Murder
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Danger has found museum director Julie Williamson once again when an annual convention of historical society directors puts her in the path of a troubled colleague. Precious artifacts are missing and landing in the hands of unscrupulous dealers to the south. Williamson immediately senses foul play. When the colleague mysteriously winds up dead, and more thefts occur, Ryland’s favourite puzzle-solving amateur detective can’t resist setting a trap. In his third Julie Williamson mystery, Andrews brings back a beloved cast of characters to help Williamson chase down the confounding clues. This case of historical whodunit, set against a backdrop of rolling hills and picturesque towns of Western Maine, is sure to keep you up reading all night.
Home Body
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95There ain’t no rest for the wicked… In Home Body, the eighth Jack McMorrow Mystery, Jack has reformed his bad boy ways and settled into seeming domestic tranquility. But the quiet life is short-lived when Jack rescues a homeless teen from a brutal gang beating. This gesture rewards him with yet another descent into violence, murder, and the dark underworld of at-risk kids living on the street. As Jack prepares for the birth of his child, his efforts to save somebody else’s child fail, and he must track down a stalker. Who is the predator and who is the prey in a world where no one can be trusted? It’s a high stakes game of hide-and-seek–one that Jack can’t afford to lose.
Straw Man
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Author Gerry Boyle takes his readers into territory all-too familiar from the daily headlines: illegal gun sales, culture clashes between old and new, cyberbullying, and the random violence that poses a threat to even the closest of communities.
Pink Chimneys
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Nineteenth-century Bangor, known as the Queen City, is a city of sharp contrasts–from the elegant mansions of Broadway, built from lumber fortunes and bootlegged alcohol money to the poverty-stricken Joppa neighbourhood lined with taverns and frequented by desperate men and “fallen women.” To survive, Maude, a headstrong midwife, Fanny, the rags-to-riches housemistress of the infamous Pink Chimneys brothel, and Elizabeth, an orphaned, demure seamstress, must form unlikely alliances and discover the strength to overcome the odds in a culture that tries–and fails–to limit their potential.
Huntin’ and Fishin’ with the Ole Man
Artist: John HulubPublisher: Islandport Press$16.95The Ole Man and company love to hunt and fish, but in the process they find themselves in plenty of pickles that require ingenuity, humor, outdoor know-how, and a lot of patience to endure. Hilarious tall tales that will become a staple at a camp or in the canoe, and will come in handy when the snows come or the fish won’t bite.
Borderline
Publisher: Islandport Press$16.95In Gerry Boyle’s 5th Jack McMorrow novel, journalist McMorrow travels to the sleepy town of Scanesett, Maine. When a man known as P. Ray Mantis has disappeared from a tour bus, no one in town seems to care. Except Jack McMorrow, who knows there’s a story too good to pass up.
The Havener Sisters
Publisher: Islandport Press$16.95The third book in Ardeana Hamlin’s Pink Chimneys series, The Havener Sisters follows the fortunes of the Havener triplets in nineteenth century Maine as they experience what happens when it becomes necessary to embrace change later in life. Hamlin returns to the setting and characters that have made her Pink Chimneys series a favorite of thousands of readers in this well-researched and engaging novel.
The Havener Sisters follows Abbott’s Reach as the third book in Ardeana Hamlin’s beloved Pink Chimneys series. The story After eight years of life as land-lubbers, the sisters are suddenly faced with a crisis in economic circumstances that propels them into new adventures—some welcome, some not. Her latest effort will transport the reader back in time at the dawn of suffrage and the Industrial age in the Northeast.
Once Burned
Publisher: Islandport Press$26.95There’s something smoldering in the drop-dead pretty town of Sanctuary and veteran crime reporter Jack McMorrow is back to sniff it out. In this long-awaited tenth installment of the wildly popular McMorrow mystery series, best-selling author Gerry Boyle crafts a smoking-hot story that will keep you riveted until the very last page.
Closer All the Time
Publisher: Islandport Press$24.95The residents of small-town Baxter are going nowhere fast—but not for lack of trying. In this deftly written novel, veteran author Jim Nichols strings together the bittersweet stories of several different characters bound together by shared geography and the insular nature of small-town life. With the Atlantic coastal waters as a backdrop, Nichols artfully explores the nature of connection—hoped for, missed, lost, and found—in Closer All the Time; that very special novel that delivers quick-moving, compelling storytelling with a lasting emotional wallop.
The Contest
Publisher: Islandport Press$25.95When the Samuel Tippett Fly Fishers club devises a fishing contest to determine the world’s best trout fly, they have no idea that the pursuit of perfection will soon overtake reason. During their quest, the ten participants fight over rules and cease caring about the feelings of their fellow members. This is a tale of how camaraderie among anglers can be tested while arguing the merits of one’s “piscatorial philosophy,” and ultimately, about finding a balance between chasing an ideal and reveling in life’s most important moments.
Strangers on the Beach
Publisher: Islandport Press$24.95Billionaire Ferdinand Sevigny is brave, bold, and brash. But his latest stunt –to sail blinded, single handed, across the Atlantic –goes horribly awry, depositing him onto the summer tourist town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. His sudden arrival trigger a eerie of sinister events that even he cannot forestall: a naked woman washes up on a beach; a confused teen-aged boy stumbles upon a crime; a naïve policeman struggles with a deadly conflict of interest. Now Sevigny, and all those lives he touches, must make decisions that will define them forever.
Abbott’s Reach
Publisher: Islandport Press$18.95Ardeana Hamlin grew up in Bingham, Maine, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the days of the river drives, the veneer mill, and the woods operations. Now a newspaper journalist, she lives in Hampden, Maine, and is the author of two previous novels, Pink Chimneys and A Dream of Paris.
Windswept
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95The third of Mary Ellen Chase’s Maine novels (following “Mary Peters” and “Silas Crockett”), “Windswept” is the romantic and tumultuous saga of a Maine family who makes its home Down East. Spanning six decades, starting in the late nineteenth century, the novel depicts their lives as they meet head on the joys and challenges of the changing and encroaching world and eventually, World War II. Through it all, their home provides the family with a safe haven in which to sink their roots as they strive to nurture their humanity and spirituality, all the while surrounded by the natural beauty of the Maine coast. “Windswept” was a national best-seller and the biggest seller of Chase’s career.
Stealing History
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95Just a few days into her new job as director of a busy historical society and museum nestled in the mountains of quaint Ryland, Maine, flatlander Julie Williamson discovers all is not as it should be. Her dream job is more of a nightmare. She expected to find an eccentric board of trustees, a cool reception from the assistant director who had wanted her job, and a necessary adjustment to small-town life, but she didn’t expect that some of the museum’s most valuable artifacts, including a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Hannibal Hamlin, would quickly turn up missing. And when a murder hits especially close to home for Julie, she becomes embroiled in an ever-widening and complex mystery. “Stealing History” is sure to enthrall readers who love to curl up with a good mystery, especially one that weaves details of small-town life, delightful characters and history into a suspenseful tale that keeps them guessing up until the last page.
Crossings: A Thomas Pichon Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Thomas Pichon seems forever at a crossroads, often choosing the path of least resistance, or at least the one most tempting. In this, the third Thomas Pichon novel, his life remains more complicated than he wishes. He encounters highwaymen on a country road, succumbs to a tempting tryst in the spa town of Bath, squanders a new love back in London and begins to long for the higher social station he once enjoyed.
Returning to Paris, his working life initially stalls, but a new lover offers help. He is given the best position he has ever had, one that requires him to go overseas. The crossing is a voyage neither he nor anyone else aboard will forget.
The Maze A Thomas Pichon Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Like the streets of his 18th-century Paris home, Thomas Pichon’s life is full of twists and turns. Despite winning his wife’s forgiveness for an extramarital affair, Thomas and his lover, Hélène, are caught a second time, and decide that it’s time for new beginnings – in London. As a writer, Thomas tries to make literary sense of the chaos of the life and language of a city teeming with excitement and danger. Hélène finds her own way out of the maze.
A Possible Madness
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Like many smallish and inelegant towns that dot the coastlines and crossroads of this country, Shean’s postwar, post-industrial economy is in desperate disrepair, and the lengths that some civic leaders will go to in order to do “what’s best” for a town like Shean sometimes requires a leap of faith that has unintended consequences. When a global corporation plans a daring scheme to exploit the remaining coal from an improbable source – and thus to secure Shean’s economic future – politicians try to marginalize the few voices of dissent. Some voices, however, are not easily silenced.
Thomas: A Secret Life
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Set in early-18th-century France, Thomas: A Secret Life is the imagined life of Thomas Pichon. We first meet Thomas as a twelve-year old in the small town of Vire, Normandy. Precociously sensuous by nature, Thomas is inclined to poetry and religious/erotic imaginings. A series of adolescent adventures provide striking background to his character. Rejecting parental insistence that he become a priest, Thomas steals away to Paris in the middle of the night. There, nearly broke, Thomas works as a lowly office clerk, joins the ranks of aspiring French writers and makes extra money serving as a part-time spy for the police of Paris. But his careers advance too slowly for his liking, and he finds himself taking regular comfort and release in prostitutes’ stalls. A rendezvous with a high-class courtesan brings a new possibility and Thomas plots a future in which he can have his cake and eat it too. Writer, lover, spy: Life is nowhere near as good or as easy as Thomas Pichon imagined it would be.
Basement Suite
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Eddy and Liz participate in a relationship study for extra cash and learn that they don’t share the same opinions about fidelity, sex, career or truth. In fact, they don’t understand each other. Eddy tries. Liz tires. Basement Suite is a sexy, cheeky look at another side of love.
Woman From Away
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95Born in 1910 Montana, Tessie Gillis in the 1950s came with her husband Joe to Rear Glencoe in Inverness County to live the hard,satisfying life of rural Cape Breton. Illness finally gave her the opportunity to write, and her friend and editor Evelyn Garbary helped her bloom into one of Cape Breton’s finest writers.
Down North
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$12.95A terrific and moving read!
These voices confirm the tenderness, good humor and rich story telling of Cape Breton Island. Down North stands as a solid tested play–whether on stage or among friends. And then, it encourages you to “Make this play your own!”–a unique and compelling invitation.
Acadian Tales from Cape Breton
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95An esteemed Canadian folklorist, Father Anselme Chiasson’s award-winning books include songs, tales and history of the Acadians of Cape Breton and the Magdalen Islands.
The Midnight Murder
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95In his short, vigorous life, McKinnon was the courageous editor of three Cape Breton newspapers, and a successful novelist. He fearlessly found a voice in the Boston literary world. Then he became a Methodist minister and tried to burn his “evil” novels. He died at 33-after a life as romantic and passionate as any of his characters.
John R and Son
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95No one has ever written about Cape Breton quite like this! A rich daring short novel, plus 5 stories. A troubling, brutal, and compassionate book that is a riveting classic.
Stories From the Woman From Away
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95A novel of a woman’s rural life, and of the people whose weaknesses and wit enrich her Cape Breton community.
The Seven-Headed Beast and Other Acadian Tales from Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$12.95This is the first book of Acadian tales now told in English, and establishes these stories as a part of Cape Breton heritage.
