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The Golden Boy A Doctor’s Journey with Addiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95Before opioids destroyed Grant Matheson’s career, he was a pillar of his community. Respected physician, loving husband, devoted father, and trusted friend. Grant was a straight-laced kid who grew up to be a clean-living adult. No drinking, no smoking, and certainly no drugs. It took everyone by surprise, most of all himself, when he became addicted to narcotics in his 30s. His story hit local press when he was found guilty of professional misconduct related to his addiction, including over-prescribing painkillers to patients so he could buy them back–an infraction that caused his physician license to be suspended.
Matheson’s memoir is a gritty account of his narcotic addiction and all that it cost him: various relationships, his career, and almost his life. The Golden Boy takes the reader from the very first day of Matheson’s drug addiction to that moment when he decided to rebuild his life through rehab and recovery.
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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.
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House of Bears
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95When Luba Kassim reluctantly returns home to Northern Ontario, the strained relationship with her traditional Ukrainian mother only heightens her feelings of alienation and isolation. A family crisis reunites her extended family and reignites old rivalries and the pain of long-held family secrets. Slowly, Luba begins piecing together her family’s unspoken past, starting in the 1930s in Ukraine, followed by emigration to England and settlement in Canada. In the process, she uncovers some startling truths about her own identity, and learns that she and her mother have much more in common than she thinks.
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Revenge of the Lobster Lover A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s lobster season at The Shores, a fishing village isolated from The Island in a storm surge. Parker, a collector of antiquities, has moved there with his partner Guillaume, a chef just out of rehab. “Hy” McAllister, a website writer looking for lobster recipes for a client’s newsletter, also needs a speaker for her Women’s Institute meeting. Enter Camilla, founder of the Lobster Liberation Legion, spouting crustacean right-to-life rhetoric. The legion starts freeing lobsters from their traps, angering the villagers and the man who runs Parker’s fisheries empire. In the tragic events that follow, the hidden connection between Parker, Guillaume and Camilla reveals itself.
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Mind Over Mussels A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Nothing big ever happens in The Shores. Ceilidhs, yes. Killings, no.
That all changes when amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister trips over a body on the beach and tumbles head first into a murder case. Cottager Lance Lord, dressed like Jimi Hendrix, has had his head split open with an axe. As Hurricane Angus storms up the coast, Hy and Mountie Jane Jamieson vie against the elements to uncover the murderer in a village where almost everyone has something to hide.
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Beach Reading
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Lorne Elliott’s new novel, Beach Reading, takes us back to the early 1970s on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, where a hilarious and colourful cast of Lorne Elliott characters are engaged in uproarious political, financial, musical, amorous, and ecological shenanigans. Our young hero, Christian, is an eloquently wry and precocious university drop-out, who has never savoured the wonders of women or alcohol. A budding naturalist raised in central Canada, he arrives on PEI for a summer job in the newly-established Barrisway National Park, and sets up camp on the beach. There, he becomes enmeshed in the struggles of the boisterous MacAkrin siblings to remain in their park-enclosed home, rivalries and lustful longings at park headquarters, and the skullduggeries of an Island political campaign. Lorne Elliott gloriously conjures the mischief and zaniness, the lovable rascals and lamentable rogues, of Island life behind the tourist posters. He deftly evokes the kindness and camaraderie of Islanders, and the Island’s high-spirited revelry. Beach Reading transforms the Land of Anne and Avonlea into the land of Wallace MacAkrin, the Barley Boys, and Barrisway. “Come play on our Island,” as the tourist slogan says, and you’ll be laughing with bittersweet delight for days.
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Home Plate, Blue Helmet: From Charlottetown to the Holy Land and Back
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Michael Conway grew up in Charlottetown’s historic north and east ends. After grade ten, Conway left PEI for a career in the Canadian Forces. We follow Private Conway through the rituals of training — rigorous, comic, and occasionally tragic. He shows us the challenges and rewards of military life for a marriage. We join Conway overseas with Canada’s NATO troops and United Nations’ peacekeeping forces. He often returns, in his mind and on leave, to his beloved neighbourhoods, remembering the Lebanese shopkeepers and J.R.’s famous nite-club where Anne Murray and Stompin’ Tom launched their careers. Conway’s memoir is the story of a soldier’s return to his home ground, to his people in their aspirations and camaraderie, struggles and triumphs.
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Cod Only Knows A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Finally! A new book in the popular Shores Mysteries series!
For the first time in thirty years, all the signs have returned to the waters off The Shores. Signs of a presumed gone, possibly legendary giant cod.
A photograph is the only evidence the big one ever existed. The Shores’s mysterious Abel Mack almost landed the most giant of the giant cod the last time they appeared.
At all costs, two powerful men with competing interests are after the biggest cod. They are closing in on The Shores–but the fisherman is missing.
Ninety-year-old Abel Mack has disappeared. At the best of times, Abel is there one minute, gone the next. His best friends and family are not sure they would recognize him if they found him.
Is he dead, by foul play or misadventure, or dead of exposure, as Mountie Jane Jamieson suspects? Or is he alive and sure to return, as his wife Gus Mack insists? Does the never-at-home Abel even exist outside Gus’s memory or imagination, Hy McAllister wonders? Or has he been kidnapped for what he knows about the codfish?
In this sixth Shores mystery by Hilary MacLeod, everyone is after the one that got away. But does anything–or anyone–who is attached to The Shores ever actually get away…alive? Cod only knows.
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Summer in the Land of Anne
Artist: CarolynPublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Six-year-old Elspeth’s mother has a surprise in store for her daughters. She’s taking Elspeth and her eleven-year-old sister on a surprise vacation. When she starts reading Anne of Green Gables aloud to the girls, they catch on–they’re going to Prince Edward Island!
Elspeth proudly dons her Anne hat on the ferry, ready to explore the Land of Anne. Although she knows she’s really visiting Lucy Maud Montgomery?s house, she feels like she recognizes everything from the books and is thoroughly enchanted. At first devastated that Montgomery’s first house was torn down by Montgomery’s uncle, Elspeth sees signs of life–chipmunks living in the old cellar.
Elspeth’s imagination is ignited. No longer satisfied with pretending to be Anne, Elspeth is instead inspired to become more like Montgomery: famous writer Elspeth of Cavendish, writing about the world she loves.
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Somewhere North of Where I Was
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Somewhere North of Where I Was is the heartrending story of a young girl whose childhood innocence was stolen. Retold with the reflective voice of a woman who has survived and transcended the trauma of childhood poverty, neglect, and abuse, Spence’s wisdom and poignant storytelling abilities suck you into the world of a little girl whose tragic circumstances are tempered with fond family memories. One may be left to wonder how it is a child can survive and move beyond such experiences.
With brazen honesty and a driving spirit of hope, perseverance and sometimes sheer stubborn will, Spence brings the reader into her world as she lived it, moving us along, pulling us apart, compelling us to continue reading. In the years of being shuffled from one alcoholic parent to another and finally into foster care, Spence becomes a little girl we cry for, love and and cheer for. Spence is everybody’s child.
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Historic PEI : Vintage Postcards of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Throughout Canada’s early days, Prince Edward Island was a thriving province with a strong tourist industry. Historic Prince Edward Island portrays the quaint lifestyle and the busy industry that Canada’s smallest province had to offer. With unique messages to friends and family, these early postcards paint a picture of history not available in history books.
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Deep Water Pearls A Collection of Women’s Memoir
Editor: Kathleen HamiltonPublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Thirteen writers dive into the deep emotional waters of their lives to write their most personal, honest stories. In doing so they transform the grit of female experience into pearls of truth and beauty.
Guided by memoir coach and editor Kathleen Hamilton, the writers reveal the most intimate turning points in their lives, memories deeply charged with meaning, moments after which their lives were never the same.
The stories are diverse: we meet a PEI farm girl exploring her early intuitive knowings, a tattooed millennial struggling with PTSD, a mature academic rebounding from the betrayal of her marriage, and a bride whose wedding day is a triumph over a treacherous past.
In The Strength it Took to Ditch You, a woman reveals her years in an abusive same-sex relationship. High School Reunion is set in Unit 9, a psych ward in Charlottetown. In The Waiting Place, a young mother from western PEI explores the meaning of home.
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The Bygone Days Folklore, Traditions & Toenails
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Reginald—better known as “Dutch”—Thompson is a multi-faceted storyteller with unforgettable voices—those of Roy from Murray Harbour North, Adelaide from Bunbury, Gus from Chepstow, and countless others—to tell the stories of the Bygone days in Prince Edward Island [sometimes NS, too]. Stories that, without Dutch’s talent and care, might be remembered only by family and close friends or lost altogether.
Remember when the train ran from tip to tip and along all the small branches, taking goods, people, and baseball teams to other parts of the Island? How about when ice cream and two pieces of cakes cost 10 cents at White’s Ice Cream Parlour on Kent Street? When lobster was not the gourmet’s delight it is now and the backs were used to fertilize the crops? That butchering the pig before a full moon will mean less fat on the meat? Or that it was bad luck to cut your nails on Sundays.
From CBC Radio to the pages of this book, you’ll hear Dutch’s voice encouraging these informative, illuminating, poignant, and hilarious stories from the minds and hearts of Maritimers born between 1895 and 1925, almost as if they were all still here and telling them to you.
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Killings at Little Rose
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95In a coastal village where what’s been buried doesn’t stay buried, what’s lost at sea doesn’t stay lost.
Sleuth Anne Brown finds herself in an eastern PEI fishing community, working undercover for the new owner of a seafood-processing plant plagued by vandalism, loss, and ill luck. The community around Little Rose Harbour has been shocked by the discovery of old, secret remains of a baby, and all their entangled secrets are coming to the surface.
On the cusp of a clandestine love affair and herself keeping secrets, Anne must sort through gossip, rumours, and lies—and dodge the menace of violence—to uncover the canker at the core of Little Rose.
But will she learn in time to prevent the mystery from becoming motive for murder?
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Mercy, Mercy A Novel
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Smart, sarcastic TV reporter Mercy Pepper struggles with feelings of guilt after her cameraman dies while on assignment with her. A news tape that he had hidden in his personal effects contains a secretly recorded conversation, and Mercy picks up the scent of corruption. She soon finds herself mired in the muck of provincial politics—the power brokers and the opportunists and those willing to go to extreme measures for a piece of the pie.
With a keen observer’s eye and sharp, sparkling wit, Stanton, a former news reporter, delivers a compelling crime/mystery story with a satisfying dash of romance.
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A Tale of Two Fiddlers The Early Days of Sports and Life in Charlottetown
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95This is the story of the Charlottetown family as seen through the eyes of the oldest boy, Fred “Fiddler” MacDonald. This memoir tells of Frederick James’ journeys in the City, starting with his days as a newspaper and a shoe-shine boy while attending Queen Square School, an all-boys Catholic school in the centre of the City. The story retraces his paper route in the mid-1950’s and the people that he encountered in his travels.
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When the Hill Came Down
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Keefe Williams lives a childhood of neglect and disconnect, feeling completely invisible. Known only for the story of the night his parents died and the freak event that killed them, he suffers silently holding on to the one thing in his life that sets him apart. When Keefe is a teenager Summer Barkley moves to the community. She is oblivious to the entrenched story of Keefe Williams’s life, giving him an opportunity to finally be someone separate from his tragic past. As their relationship develops, Keefe can claim his true identity.
Through Keefe’s art and Summer’s writing the need to truly explore and understand the past becomes something from which they cannot run. When the Hill Came Down explores greed, jealousy, love, loyalty and the very fabric of a community full of stories whose threads intertwine. The colour, texture and multi-faceted of any story in any community, bear scrutiny. Nothing is ever exactly the way it seems.
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A Reluctant Search for Spiritual Truths
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95When Adrian McNally Smith was writing his family memoir Finding Forgiveness, he was struck by the number of times he had had spiritual encounters. The journey of writing the story of his life and his relationships brought home to him the fact that he had felt a sense of hubris before many important and life-changing moments in his life. Going through the process of forgiveness and the counseling he needed to forgive his father awakened in him the desire to dig deeper into these encounters and what it means to be embrace spirituality. This reluctant search changed his life and sparked a whole new awareness of spirituality.
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All is Clam A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s Christmas at The Shores. There’s no snow yet, but there are so many outdoor lights that the tiny coastal village can be seen from space. Apart from Ian Simmons’ place, and he’s considered odd, there’s only one house in the village that isn’t lit up. It’s been dark for years. That’s about to change. Wild Rose Cottage is about to come to life, and death, once again. Meanwhile, the villagers wish for snow to complete the Christmas portrait. When it comes, it’s with the body of newcomer, Fitz Fitsimmons, a former acrobat turned bully and drunk. Mountie Jane Jamieson has seen murder here before, but none where she’d rather not catch the killer.
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Something Fishy A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Herrings are falling from the sky over The Shores – an unusual phenomenon anywhere, but especially so in this case. A newcomer, Anton Paradis, has set up a restaurant that specializes in dangerous dining, cooking up food that can kill to tantalize the palates of wealthy clients. It’s a recipe for death. Someone’s bound to get hurt.
Someone does. Oddly, the victim dies laughing. By accident or design?
Mountie Jane Jamieson suspects it’s no accident. But could there really be another murder at The Shores?
All the while, a wind turbine slices its blades over the cape, menacing the villagers with its eerie presence. Death is in the wind as well as on the dinner plate.
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Bodies and Sole A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95The Shores is celebrating a killer 200th anniversary. A skull tossed up on the beach sparks a heritage murder investigation.
Meanwhile, serial widow Vera Gloom moves into the village with her three ex- husbands. Are they one big happy family? Amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister has her doubts, and things get even more interesting when Vera starts working on husband number four. Hy has to convince Mountie Jane Jamieson that these people are more than just a little dysfunctional—before it’s too late.
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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.
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