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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.
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Foul Deeds
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95A professional criminologist, Rosalind works with a cranky private investigator named McBride—a long-time association that has led her from one sordid foray to another in the world of crime. Her passionate escape is theatre and her latest venture is with a company of out-of-work actors putting on an independent production of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s language is a fabulous distraction until the uncanny parallels between life and art begin to unnerve her. Peter King, a respected environmental lawyer working tirelessly to keep water in the public domain, dies suddenly. Is it murder? His son Daniel thinks so. And as Roz and McBride delve deeper into the case, it becomes all too clear that there are those who will stop at nothing to ensure their foul deeds stay buried.
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Evangeline
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$13.95The epic poem Evangeline is a superb example of romantic poetry and a masterpiece of world literature. The publication of Evangeline represented a “milestone in the awakening of the collective consciousness of the Acadian people. By lifting Acadie out of the forgotten past, Longfellow honoured the courage and tenacity of the Acadians.” This new edition of the classic text includes a critical introduction from scholars Sally Ross and Barbara LeBlanc.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet. Sally Ross and Barbara LeBlanc are both Acadian scholars and authors living and working in Nova Scotia.
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Maritime Murder
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95In his uniquely homespun style, sinister storyteller Steve Vernon digs up the dirt on Maritime murders from 1770 to 1929—along with a few bodies along the way. Unearthing historically buried, and occasionally unsolved, violent crimes from across Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, Vernon’s versions of these 19 macabre tales will chill you to the bone.
Featuring a bevy of questionable characters from the darkest recesses of Maritime history, Maritime Murder divulges a diverse array of bygone crimes, trials, and the eerie aftermath. From botched executions and poisonous tea, to axe murders and curious cover-ups, bear witness to the villains and victims of some of the dastardliest deeds this side of the Atlantic.
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The Lunenburg Werewolf
$15.95The wind is howling and a full moon is in the sky-it must be time for more chilling tales from storyteller Steve Vernon.
Spanning the length and width of Nova Scotia, these 25 blood-chilling yarns make perfect campfire fare. Some stories are so terrifying that they have been told far and wide, such as the Ghosts of Oak Island or The Haunting of Esther Cox. Others, including the Murder Island Massacre and the Caledonia Mills Spook, might be lesser known, but are no less scary. Written in Steve Vernon’s unique style, these stories of the haunted, the supernatural, and the unexplainable are part history, part folklore, and a lot of old-fashioned, frightening fun.
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Big Town A Novel of Africville
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Seventeen-year-old Early Okander lives with his father in a shack, a white family on the outskirts of the Halifax community of Africville. It is the early 1960s, and Early and his young friends, Toby and Chub, start to hear whispers that the city wants to move the residents of Africville out of their homes. As the three try to sort out what relocation might mean for the community, they also struggle to come to terms with their own problems: Early’s abuse at the hands of his father, Toby’s illness, Chub’s family breakdown.
Written from Early’s unique perspetive, Big Town is an unforgettable account of a community in crisis and the remarkable spirit that persists in the face of adversity.
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Shoot Me
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95A new smaller format of Lesley Crewe’s second novel, now with a reader’s guide and author interview.
The 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.”
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Case Against Owen Williams
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Allan Donaldson’s first novel, Maclean, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Donaldson’s new novel is a literary mystery set in the fictional town of Wakefield, New Brunswick, against the backdrop of the Second World War. Following a night at The Silver Dollar dance hall, a teenage girl turns up dead in a gravel pit. The last person reported to have seen her is Owen Williams, an introverted soldier stationed with the local garrison of “Zombies”—conscripted men unwilling to serve overseas. When Lieutenant Bernard Dorkin, a young lawyer from Saint John, volunteers to defend Williams, whom he believes is innocent, he finds himself up against a theatrical local favourite leading the prosecution and a public mostly hell-bent on a foregone conclusion. The Case Against Owen Williams explores the potential for wrongful conviction and the gaps in the justice system that allow it to flourish.
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Bluenose Ghosts (2nd Edition)
$22.95Ghosts guarding buried treasure, phantom ships, haunted houses and supernatural warnings of death—these are just some of the strange and mysterious phenomena that you will encounter in Bluenose Ghosts. These unexplained mysteries are all the more chilling because they are based on personal experiences of ordinary people, told to Helen Creighton, one of Canada?s most respected and renowned folklorists, over a period of thirty years. So when the moon is full and the wind is howling, be prepared to be spooked by apparitions and things that go bump in the night. Bluenose Ghosts was an instant hit when it was first published in 1957.
This new edition of Bluenose Ghosts features a new foreword from Nova Scotia writer Clary Croft that explores Creighton’s enduring influence on the province’s folklore.
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Halifax Haunts
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The streets of Historic Halifax are paved with the dark and eerie tales of its colourful and gruesome past. Shadowy secrets and hints of the unknown are lurking around every corner and in the mist that rolls in from the Atlantic. Centuries of tragic happenstance have left behind many restless spirits that are awaiting your discovery: the ghost of an eighteenth-century French admiral has been spotted marching- to the beat of his own missing heart- across the harbour and through the streets of Halifax; the haunting profile of a victim of the Halifax Explosion has been seen in the window of the city’s oldest church; a spectral tall ship has been sighted plying the waters just off Point Pleasant looking for a rematch with its War of 1812 opponent.
Halifax Haunts presents the spooky history behind thirty-three of the city’s scariest places. Master storyteller Steve Vernon serves as your trusted guide and offers phenomenal detail while winding you through the ghostly and ghastly happenings that still haunt Halifax to this day. -
Maritime UFO Files
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Though UFOs have recently “landed” a significant place in pop culture, they have made their presence known in the Maritimes for decades. In fact, one of the earliest known sightings of a UFO was reported to Judge Simeon Perkins in Nova Scotia in 1796.Beginning with the 1950s, Maritime UFO Files Chronicles, decade-by-decade, dramatic and unusual sightings of a variety of mysterious, multi-shaped UFOs witnessed by pilots, ordinary citizens, and even RCMP officers. These first-hand accounts, based on actually military documents and RCMP reports, range from the observation of unexplainable lights in the sky, to claims of abduction. This book also devotes a chapter to the famous Shag Harbour Incident of 1967 –an event that remains one of the most documented accounts of a UFO crash in modern history.
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Bluenose Magic
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Bluenose Magic, first published in 1968, is considered a classic of Maritime literature, and its author, Dr. Helen Creighton, is one of Canada’s best-loved and most respected folklorists.
This fascinating and engaging companion to the author’s best-selling Bluenose Ghosts welcomes readers into a world of forerunners, enchantment, dreams, divination, buried treasure, guardian ghosts, home remedies, and mystical occurrences. These unique tales have been passed on from generation to generation of Nova Scotia’s families. -
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More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95Are you still afraid of things that go bump in the night? Do you still think someone is watching you even though no one is there? Do doors and windows still open and close on their own? Do you still see people in your home even though you know you are alone? If you answer yes to even one of these questions, then More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia will make you feel not alone.
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Where Evil Dwells
Editor: Vernon OicklePublisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95From the macabre to the fantastical, from the paranormal to superstitions and folklore, from stories of ghosts, monsters and legends, Where Evil Dwells: The Nova Scotia Anthology of Horror has it all. These stories will take you on a wild ride to the extreme limits and beyond the realm of reality. Anyone who loves a good ghost story will want this book. It is a must-have for horror fans!
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Poetic Inquiries of Reflection and Renewal
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$39.95From migration, teaching, attending to the sick and dying, or navigating new relationships or identities, the poems in this collection are at once evocative and poignant and at times playful. This book offers insight into what is possible with the poetic voice.
This book can be read from beginning to end or by reading non-sequentially among the contributions. The editors of this collection have brought together a diverse array of authors who use poetry as research, and who explore many ways in which poetry can bring the reader into deeper understandings of experiences or issues.
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My island’s the house I sleep in at night
Publisher: Island Studies Press$18.95“Being an Islander means that you aren’t like everyone else.” Bounded by water, you can live your life with certainty knowing where your edges are. Drawn from interviews with artists from Newfoundland and Tasmania, these poems capture what it means to be an islander. To know every rock and tickle, “the sea your road /the whole in the sky /your light to travel by. In My island’s the house I sleep in at night, Brinklow weaves stories and images with her own poetic imaginings.
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Bird Calls The Island Responds
Publisher: Island Studies Press$14.95In 1854 British travel writer Isabella Lucy Bird visited Prince Edward Island for six weeks and published an account of her stay there that was both scathing and charming. “Paris may be the gayest city in the world,” she wrote, “and London the richest, but Charlottetown was the most gossiping.” “I never saw a community,” she continued,” in which people appear to hate each other so cordially.”
Contemporary Island poet Jane Ledwell was both fascinated and exasperated by Bird’s haughty, privileged judgement and decided to “write back”–160 years later. The result is Bird Calls: The Island Responds.
Bird Calls weaves the travel prose of Isabella Lucy Bird with Ledwell’s poems written in response, and delivers an intriguing conversation for the reader which contrasts PEI then and now, and showcases the talents of two accomplished writers, from very different generations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Rudan Mi-bheanailteach is an Cothroman/ Intangible Possibilites
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95LEWIS MACKINNON was born in Inverness, Cape Breton, to a Gaelic-speaking father and a French Acadian mother. He was raised in Antigonish County, on the Nova Scotia mainland. Educated in English, throughout his personal, academic and professional activities, Lewis has maintained an interest in his Gaelic roots. He is an accomplished singer as well as poet. His first collection Famhair agus dàin Ghàidhlig eile (Giant and other Gaelic poems) was published in 2008 (CBU Press). Since then he has been invited to numerous literary festivals internationally and, in 2011, was named Bard of the Royal National Mod (Mòd Nàiseanta Rìoghail) in Scotland, the first bard from outwith Scotland.
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Clay Pots and Bones
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95The poetry of Clay Pots and Bones is Lindsay Marshall’s way of telling stories, of speaking with others about what things that matter to him. His heritage. His people. His life as a Mi’kmaw. For the reader, Clay Pots and Bones is a colourful journey from early days, when the People of the Dawn understood, interacted with and roamed the land freely, to the turbulent present and the uncertain future where Marshall envisions a rebirth of the Mi’kmaq. The poetry challenges and enlightens. It will, most certainly, entertain.
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Famhair/Giant
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$15.95No contemporary work from a sole author of Gaelic poetry from the Nova Scotia perspective been published in this province – until now. Cultural identity, sense of place and expression are important elements in the work of any artist. This book of contemporary Nova Scotia Gaelic poetry spans the landscape of Gaelic Cape Breton, the eastern Nova Scotia mainland and indeed the broader collective consciousness of Nova Scotians within the confines of their own province and in the wider, diverse, multi-ethnic, North American reality.
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A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Narrative Obituary Verse and Song in Northern Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95This rare book is about community, caring and pioneer survival. It brings to life Andrew Dunphy— a man who roamed northern Cape Breton, carried the news, nursed his neighbours—and wrote magnificent obituary poems that told their stories, comforted them in disaster, and helped their communities survive. Over one hundred years later, Ronald Caplan captured this story in its final hours. Told with the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy — A Stone for Andrew Dunphy reveals the robust rural life that flourished as the 20th century dawned.
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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.
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Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes
Editor: Michael Taft, Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95These are the folk tales from Dr. Helen Creighton’s life journey through the Maritime Provinces, collecting songs and ghost stories and old cures–and folk tales. Helen serves as our guide, introducing us to storytellers, setting the scene of the telling–and then she lets the person tell the story just as it was told to her.
The feel of the kitchen and the fish shed still cling to these stories. Some are long, really miraculous folk tales–miraculous in detail and in that they have managed to survive. Others are the brief riddle or the tantalizing quick-telling that a folklorist can expect along the way. Helen kept it all. And taken as a whole, the reality and intensity of those rare smaller pieces reveal their value in among the more finished, well-told tales.
Both Helen Creighton and A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes are Atlantic treasures. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Taft and Ronald Caplan, and a Motif Index by Michael Taft.
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Great Cape Breton Storytelling
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95From a lifetime of collecting, Ron Caplan offers tales from the rare complex of Cape Breton Island. From a grim sealing trek to a mother’s courage in a windstorm, to memories of drunken hens, to a shark attack. Mackerel fishermen bag a huge tuna, and an itinerant butcher chases a wild cow. The book includes fables from the island’s Czech, Pakistani, and Lebanese heritage in among stories from the Gaelic, French and Mi’kmaq traditions. Good solid reading in one lasting collection!
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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.
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The Blind Man’s Eyes
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95With over 100 of her best poems plus George Elliott Clarke’s essay on the achievement of Rita Joe, The Blind Man’s Eyes confirms Joe’s place in Canadian literature.
From a homeless child who led a blind beggar door-to-door, Rita Joe emerged as spokesperson for her nation and for the individual’s heart. Her much anthologized poems and rare autobiography have riveted her message to the Canadian conscience, revealing both the Mi’kmaq people and the universal artist’s heart of this Elder.
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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.
