Moonlight Skater 9 Cape Breton Stories and The Dream
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95A mischievous blend of Scottish and Acadian, these stories blossom, or explode softly, in your life.
Ashes of My Dreams
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Pregnant, abandoned by her lover, and cut off from her family, free-spirited and independent Gracie is determined to keep her baby and to raise him on her own.
Protecting Elijah Blue from the nuns eager to adopt him out to a “better” home is only Gracie’s first battle…
It takes a whole community of colourful neighbours and friends—and the dream-wisdom of spirits that protect her—for Gracie to navigate the cruel and impoverishing systems that judge and harass her as a single mom on PEI.
She gets through with pride, grit, and humour—but nothing can protect her from her growing son’s desire to know his father’s identity.
The Grand Change
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95William Andrews’ first novel examines life in a small PEI communityin the 1940s and 50s as changes, so common in the restof the world, begin to take hold. Using a road as an allegory, heweaves a lyrical tale of simple country people, their strugglesand their joys. The story is told through the eyes of a boy calledJake: he is the witness to life on the Hook Road and the eventsthat change that life forever. The book is in some ways like along poem: the people and the world they inhabit are richlyand meticulously described, and the superb writing takes thereader to a world no one will ever see again.
Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
Shape of Things to Come
Editor: Richard LemmPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this new collection, Richard Lemm traces his own journey from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Canada with his first foray into the world of short fiction. His hard-living characters follow their own paths through relationships with parents and siblings, friends and lovers, discovering and sometimes crossing their limits as they try to find their own way in the world. A thirty-something man takes a chance on finding love after he encounters an exotic opera singer on an airplane. Two brothers face their own ghosts as they come to terms with the death of their father. A young man tries to live with his friends’ idea of justice after one of them crosses the line. The stories are decidedly masculine – sometimes apologetically so – but always honest. They resonate long after the pages are closed, offering a fresh voice from one of Atlantic Canada’s finest poets.
A Bountiful Harvest
Editor: Alice Anna ReesePublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Little did organizers know when they planted the seed 15 years ago that the Literary Awards would reap such a bountiful harvest. This collection of over 35 first-prize short stories, poetry, and writing for children represents the best new writing in Prince Edward Island. Readers will recognize several of the names – people who have gone on to be published or produced – including Rai Berzins, Lesley-Anne Bourne, Judy Gaudet, Elaine Hammond, Hugh MacDonald, Brent MacLaine, Steve McOrmond, Dianne Hicks Morrow, Melissa Mullen, Libby Oughton, and Nancy Russell.
And My Name Is Stories from the Quilt
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this, Margie Carmichael’s first collection of short stories, ordinary women have extraordinary skills, gifts and strengths; they are women who live next door or in the distance, shadowed by fear or absence of recognition. Age, race, and culture connect in the timeless fabric of the quilt, with craft, patience, and faith connecting the women through the threads of their diversity.Anna tells of life after residential school; Irini reflects on her life in war-torn Afghanistan. In Tansie, two adults survive childhood abandonment. Freelance cosmetician to the dead Flora Hill offers insight into the lighter side of love, marriage, and death.Featuring illustrations by Dale McNevin, the book is a collaboration that began with an original painting and companion poem first published in the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health 2000 Calendar.
Hangman’s Beach
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95A skilful blend of romance and historical fact woven about Halifax, Nova Scotia, while the Napoleonic Wars were shaking the world. A few miles away on Melville Island, a French prisoner daily faces the agonizing question: What would be his fate if the British discovered that he had shot and killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar?
Seizing Ivy: A Pompey Story
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$16.95At once poignant and humorous, this is the touching story of a proud woman’s painful adjustments to the realities of aging, changing standards, and mother-daughter misapprehensions.
David Lazar A Novel
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$24.50Robert Kalich blurs the lines between memoir and fiction to tell a timeless story of love and redemption, with a dash of noir.
David Lazar is a born and bred New Yorker reflecting on the arc of his life as he composes his memoir. Filled with colorful New York characters–childhood friends, business mentors, wealthy associates, organized crime figures, celebrities, and sports stars–and told by a complex and compelling narrator, the city from the 1950s up to the present comes alive. The Big Apple is Lazar’s cradle and his cauldron, and a life like Lazar’s is unique to New York City.
A professional sports gambler, Lazar is haunted by the immoral nature of the very work that made him rich. His innermost being is shaken as he reimagines the dehumanizing nature of his work and former life. Did he sell his soul to make it? Is there redemption for wealth based on corruption and violence? If he is completely honest, does he risk losing what he cherishes the most: the love and respect of his wife and son? Lazar has a decision to make. This is the story of a perilous journey into the soul of a man who risks losing far more than he’s ever won.
Welcome to the world of David Lazar, the world of doubt and self-doubt, where life is lived as a novel and a novel is truer than life.
It Is Always Summer
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$6.95It Is Always Summer is the last of the four Kingston novels that David Helwig produced in the closing decades of the last century in which, as one reviewer put it, he “transforms Kingston into an exotic Venice of the north.”(Matt Cohen) The narrative is as luxurious and disturbing as the lives reflected in it. This new edition has been revised by the author. “David Helwig has done that rare thing: written a novel about men and women that describes all characters in equal detail, sensitivity and depth in poetic, sensual language.” (Montreal Gazette.)
Clyde
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$18.95Betrayed by his oldest friend, a boyhood companion, his gingerly constructed career at stake, Clyde Bryanton, a property developer and Ottawa political consultant, unpeels layers and layers of memory, a half century of getting along by going along. Fatherless, his sire a casualty of the Dieppe raid, Clyde is as baffled by the emotions that occasionally sound from his depths as he is by his mentors, banker and the senator who manipulate money and power in a small Canadian city. A stranger even to his wife, who dubs him ‘Silent Joe,’ he navigates social, familial, political and commercial obligations with the same cool skills he exhibits on the golf courses that weave in and out of the fabric of his life. The darkest of secrets become no more to Clyde than the bunkers and sand traps he avoids with his selections of irons as he gambles a mysterious five thousand dollars against access to the wife of an envied son of privilege. This latest novel by distinguished Canadian author David Helwig, describes a North America, whether Canada or the United States, of eyes on the ground and noses to the grindstone, of business as politics and politics as business, of kindness and malice and nameless fear. Clyde, is an incisive portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and of the culture that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.
Our Lady of Steerage
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$26.95The visceral connection between Dvorah, rejected infant of grieving mother, and Mariasse, a young girl from Krakow, who nurses her in the lower decks of the ship carrying them to the new world. For four decades they wander in and out of each other’s lives, their relationship weathering fierce devotion and bitter betrayal. Its image-driven prose manifests the vagaries of memory and the struggle for self-reinvention.
The Same Old Story
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$19.99Goncharov’s first novel, Obyknovennaya istoriya or “The Same Old Story,” wittily presents the conflicts between the excessive romanticism of a young Russian nobleman freshly arrived in Saint Petersburg from the provinces and the sober pragmatism of his bourgeois uncle. It appeared in 1847 in the periodical “The Contemporary,” and created a sensation, marking the debut of one of Russia?s greatest writers. It deserves an equal place with Goncharov’s classic Oblomov.
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.
Roger Sudden An Historical Novel of Conflict, Adventure, and Passion
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Roger Sudden, first published in 1944, is a stirring historical novel set in Nova Scotia during the English/French rivalry over the possession of North America. Roger Sudden, a ruthless trader with both the English and the French, becomes embroiled in the bitter conflict between Halifax and Louisbourg for control of the northern continent.
Banjo Flats
Publisher: Boularderie Island Press$19.95She’s called Fortune, orphaned at the age of thirteen and disguised as a boy in order to survive and fit in with the other drifters and dusters. Her mother taught her to read and write. Her father taught her to handle guns. She’s nobody’s fool and a crack shot, which lands her in a heap of trouble after killing one of the territory’s most notorious and crazed gunfighters on the day she arrives in Banjo Flats — Territory of Dakota– the most lawless town in the Wild West. It’s a place where frontier justice is mostly settled with the barrel of a rifle. Fortune didn’t come to Banjo Flats looking for trouble but it found her anyway. There’s a price on her head. Every outlaw with a gun is headed to Banjo Flats thinking they can earn some easy money by killing the girl gunslinger. They’re wrong.
Some Days Run Long and other stories
$19.95Some Days Run Long and other stories features whimsy, humour, ire, reflection, tall tales, and passion. It even includes rhyming poems. Bill Conall’s novel The Promised Land: a novel of Cape Breton won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2014. His earlier novel The Rock in the Water was short-listed for the same award.
Promised Land- A Novel of Cape Breton
$19.95Awarded the 2014 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal For Humour, The Promised Land skillfully and hilariously navigates the ebb and flow of island life on Cape Breton where things go from bad to worse to Oh My Goodness! And all the while, the author shares his characters’ belief that “They’re all good days if we’re here to see them.”
Black Snow
$19.95Black Snow is a love story set during the Halifax Explosion. The 1917 disaster was the largest man-made blast the world had ever known, and it cut Halifax off from the rest of the world for the darkest thirty-six hours in its history. Rich in fact and shocking images, the story sets a blistering pace following one man’s search through a ruined city for the love of his life as he confronts the wreckage of his past.
