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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.
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Berth
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Uprooted, longing for love and to feel somehow situated, Willa Jackson flees life as a military wife when she meets Hugh, the lighthouse keeper on McNabs Island in Halifax Harbour. The object of her fantasies, a musician, he’s the last of a dying breed in this story set during the final days of lightkeeping before automation. Romanced by this magical location—so close to the city and its lively communities, yet so remote—she involves her ten-year-old son, Alex, in her escape. Things sour when isolation and Hugh, harbourer of secrets deadlier than she can imagine, turn as brutal as the forces of nature—and of self-deception—that threaten to engulf all three. A tender yet heartbreaking story of one woman’s reckoning.
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Purple for Sky
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Mayhem unfolds and loyalties unravel in a tightly knit clan of Bible-thumping shopkeepers when the formidable Ruby Clarke develops dementia, and a secret is revealed about her mother that shatters ties binding Ruby’s niece, Lindy Hammond, to the failing family business. Set in a shrinking community in northern Nova Scotia—a town that a century ago was an industrial hub—this unforgettable novel interweaves the lives of three women from three generations and of the husbands, lovers, and customers who cross them. Past and present come to life in this rich, award-winning story that blends humour and grit, realism and the magic of everyday things, as colourful as the crazy quilt cherished by its characters.
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These Good Hands
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Captive to a staggering genius and mounting paranoia, Mademoiselle—the fictional incarnation of legendary French sculptor Camille Claudel—relives her art-making in Belle Époque Paris from the asylum where she’s been captive for thirty years. The year is 1943, the height of the Vichy regime in war-torn France, and salvation comes in the form of Solange Poitier, the nurse who cares for Mademoiselle in her final days, and their growing friendship. In this compassionate, deftly-researched novel melding art history and storytelling, art and medicine mingle in the characters’ rejection of the misogynistic conditions that would stifle their deepest ambitions and gifts. Best known as Rodin’s muse and mistress, Claudel is given a voice here that’s fiercely hers and her art a recognition long due.
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Glass Voices 10th anniversary edition
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Surviving the Halifax Explosion is one thing, but how do Lucy Caines and her wayward husband, Harry, a couple who lose everything to the event’s horrors, make peace with their grief? Rebuilding on the rustic shores of Halifax’s Northwest Arm, steps from where the shaft of the Mont Blanc‘s anchor lands that fateful day in 1917. But coping with the disappearance on that day of their infant daughter, they descend into an isolating denial: Lucy through guilt and reticence, and Harry through drinking and gambling. Despite the birth of a treasured son, each faces a future clouded by fear and apprehension. Then, fifty-two years after the catastrophe, Harry suffers a stroke. Lucy confronts the miracle of their survival and their debilitating loss, re-examining the past and her role in its making, and struggling to become the author of her own happiness.
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A Circle on the Surface
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95It’s 1943. Enman and Una Greene are newly married. Each is haunted by their respective pasts, and each harbours secrets. They have hopes of a happy life together—though they have little idea how to create such a life.
Enman brings Una to his childhood home in rural Barrein, Nova Scotia, where he hopes they will stay. Una is restless and feeling increasingly trapped, and longs for the city life she once had. Una meets a mysterious man, and then a body washes up on a beach. There are rumours of German sailors roaming the dunes. When the Greenes receive the news they have been waiting for, and that Una is convinced will save her and her marriage, she begins to unravel in ways neither is prepared for.
From critically acclaimed and bestselling author Carol Bruneau comes an achingly honest portrait of a marriage in a time of war—and an examination of how it is that we come to know ourselves.
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A Bird on Every Tree
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Carol Bruneau, author of six acclaimed works of fiction (most recently, These Good Hands), brings her finely honed voice to 12 new stories about shifting concepts of Nova Scotian identity.
In “The Race,” a war bride’s remarkable life trajectory unfolds as she competes in an international swim marathon in the Northwest Arm. Strain erupts between a Haligonian couple in “Burning Times,” while they struggle to keep track of one another, both physically and emotionally, on an Italian vacation. In “Polio Beach,” cousins gather oceanside over the will of a recently deceased aunt who once saved one of them from drowning.
Writing with empathy, humour, and linguistic precision, Bruneau follows characters who find themselves connected to Nova Scotia by birth, through attempts at escape and new beginnings, or as a temporary resting place, always carrying with them their own idiosyncratic and complex definitions of “home.”
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