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Amazing Grace
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Can you really move forward without putting the past to rest?
Grace Willingdon has everything she needs. For fifteen years she’s lived in a trailer overlooking Bras d’Or Lakes in postcard-perfect Baddeck, Cape Breton, with Fletcher Parsons, a giant teddy bear who’s not even her husband. But Grace’s blissful life is rudely interrupted when her estranged son calls from New York City, worried about his teenaged daughter.
Before she knows it, Grace finds herself the temporary guardian of her self-absorbed, city-slicker granddaughter, Melissa. Trapped between a past she’s been struggling to resolve and a present that keeps her on her toes, Grace decides to finally tell her story. Either the truth will absolve her, or cost her everything.
Crackling with Lesley Crewe’s celebrated wit and humour, Amazing Grace is a heartfelt tale of enduring love and forgiveness, and the deep roots of family.
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Maclean (2nd edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95Twenty-five years after the Great War, John Maclean is still struggling to carve out a meaningful existence in his small New Brunswick hometown.
One late summer day he embarks on a seemingly prosaic search for a little money, a little booze, and a birthday gift for his mother. But he’s haunted by memories—of war, of his cruel father, of opportunities wasted and lost—and each moment is shadowed by his bleak history. Shell-shocked and alcoholic, Maclean is divided between a lonely present and a violent past.
With clean and evocative prose, author Allan Donaldson exquisitely depicts a shattered war veteran’s search for peace. New edition.
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Chloe Sparrow a novel
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn’t take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.
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The Strangers’ Gallery
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95St. John’s archivist Michael Lowe’s life is turned on its head when a Dutch acquaintance, Anton Aalders, arrives on his doorstep in 1995. Anton is searching for a father he never met, ostensibly a Newfoundland soldier who was part of the Allied forces that liberated the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War. Anton’s visit stretches from a few days to a few months, reluctant as he is to go in search of his father, and keen to learn as much as he can about Newfoundland, its history, and its people. Rabble-rouser and ardent Newfoundland patriot Brendan “Miles” Harnett, Michael’s friend and sometime bugbear, is obsessed with his own search for the lost “fatherland” of Newfoundland, which relinquished its political independence in 1934. Miles is only too eager to teach Anton—and Michael—the shameful, forgotten history (as he sees it) of the lost country of Newfoundland. The Strangers’ Gallery is a finely crafted, at times humorous, novel about the painful search for identity—both political and personal.
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Keeping Things Whole
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95It’s 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony is the child of a demanding single mother and an absconding Vietnam War resister who got too used to leaving home, country, and family. With a keen eye on the hybrid Windsor-Detroit landscape, backhanded affection for his hometown, and a growing understanding of his own family’s place in its bootleg history, Antony makes his living as a house painter by day before catapulting loads of Canadian weed across the river to Detroit by night.
Then he meets Kate Chan, a beautiful, street-smart law student, who calls his bluff and picks apart his personal mythology. Ultimately she presents him with his own hard choice and forces him to realize he’s been smuggling much more than he knows. Keeping Things Whole recounts the arc of their relationship and is cut with Antony’s entertaining manifestoes on marijuana, legality, art, theatre, sex, money, and lineage.
With this, his second novel, Darryl Whetter gives us a maddeningly cocky but introspective hero, and his frank, nuanced portrait of a border city and its underground history.
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Kin
Artist: Deanne FitzpatrickPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Traditions, created, and subverted. Love, nurtured and destroyed. Friendships, marriages, and the wild beauty of Cape Breton Island. And above all, kin, in all its convoluted forms.
In Kin, bestselling author Lesley Crewe traces the tangled lines of loyalty, tragedy, joy, and love through three generations of families. Beginning with Annie Macdonald, an effervescent seven-year-old living in Glace Bay in the 1930s, and ending with Annie’s great-niece Hilary, an idealistic twenty-year-old in Round Island in 2000, the story is complex and riveting. The cast of characters is vast and varied-some with the island’s deliciously cutting wit, some dour and uptight, some frail, some resilient, and all inextricably bound by their shared histories.
Brimming with humour and poignancy, Kin is a celebration of the heartbreaking, maddening joy that is family.
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You Could Believe in Nothing
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Jamie Fitzpatrick’s debut novel tells of a muddled adulthood in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Derek is forty-one years old. His girlfriend has just left him for a job in Ottawa, his father, a DJ at the local classic rock station, is about to go to court, and his rec hockey team is up in arms about a TV reporter’s attempts to glorify their weekly games. When Derek’s half-brother, Curtis, comes home, the visit stirs up nagging questions about their parents’ early days, and Derek examines again what it means to make commitments that may or may not bring real happiness.
Fitzpatrick captures the subtleties of casual conversation and the often understated wit that emerges between old friends. Having grown up after the decline of whatever might have been the real Newfoundland, Derek and his teammates are generally at a loss to defend the urban, mostly wayward lives the occupy. Set into a wet spring in St. John’s, its rinks, streets, and landmarks, and the sunken map of old haunts and years gone by, You Could Believe in Nothing is a study in familiarity and self-definition, underlining how little we sometimes know about ourselves and the people we know best.
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Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret—a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.
Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton—back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.
Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs—even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.
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Kiss the Joy As It Flies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour. A new smaller format of Fitch’s critically acclaimed adult novel.
Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental to-do list and sets about putting her messy life in order. But tidying up the edge of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to-dos. Between fits of weeping and laughter, ranting and bliss, Mercy must contemplate the meaning of life in the face of her own death. In a week filled with the riot of an entire life, nothing turns out the way she expected.
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Hit & Mrs.
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they’re all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda’s philandering husband’s Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who’s actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they’d expected.
A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda’s husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda’s husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe’s Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.
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Hero
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95In a St. John’s hospital in 1945, Elsa Evans keeps a furtive vigil over the deathbed of Abram Kean, the renowned sealing captain. Remembering her first husband and her two brothers killed in the trenches thirty years before, and another young friend, Noah, frozen on the ice during the sealing disaster of 1914, Elsa contemplates a hideous revenge. The shock of her own bitterness forces her to retrace part of her life which is interwoven with those of her former employers, Simon and Sarah Jenson.
On the morning of July 1916, officer Lt. Simon Jenson, severely shell-shocked and demoralized after a year and a half in the trenches, fails in leadership, hanging behind his men as they march through into no-man’s-land. When a figure emerges from the drifting smoke, he thrusts the blade of his bayonet forward not into the enemy but into the body of Charles Baxter, a comrade and the brother of his fiancée, Sarah. Surviving against the odds, and with his battlefield actions misinterpreted, Simon is feted as a hero. But when Simon returns from the war, Sarah finds him emotionally fragile and prone to violent rages- not even their young daughter Lucy can cheer him. Worse, their lives are soon overtaken by the shadow of blackmail, and Sarah and Elsa, Lucy’s governess, are forced to reconsider everything they once believed about loyalty, valour, and responsibility.
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Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret-a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.
Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton- back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.
Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can. -
Wicked Woods
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95A new collection of ghost stories from every corner of New Brunswick.
Pull up a seat and listen closely-storyteller Steve Vernon has another collection of classic, bone-chilling tales to tell. Steve takes readers from one end of New Brunswick to the other, unearthing dark tales of strange happenings along the way-from the headless ghost that haunts those who pass through Johnville’s covered bridge, to the spirit of a murdered man that guards long-buried treasure at Wolf Point. Drawing on both documented stories and legends passed on by word-of-mouth, Steve sets one spooky scene after another with a storyteller’s attention to every creepy detail, and just a touch of wry humour. It’s as though you’re sitting beside him at the campfire, getting goosebumps as each story unfolds. -
Kiss the Joy as it Flies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95With all the wisdom, humour, and joy we’ve come to expect from Sheree Fitch, Kiss the Joy As It Flies marks the well-loved author’s move from children’s literature to adult fiction. Set in the fictional Maritime town of Odell, with a cast of exasperating but lovable characters, Kiss the Joy As It Flies promises to be a remarkable debut and a reader’s favourite.Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental “to do” list and sets about putting her messy life in order. Among other things (hide the vibrator!), she’s determined to finally uncover the identity of her secret admirer; reconnect with a lost friend and rival Teen Gaudet; and, most importantly, get her hands on the note her father left her before committing suicide all those years ago.But tidying up the edges of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to do’s. Between fits of weeping and laughter, ranting and bliss, Mercy must contemplate the meaning of life in the face of her own death. In a week filled with the riot of an entire life, nothing turns out the way she’d expected.
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Nymph and the Lamp
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95A Nova Scotia classic, The Nymph and the Lamp is the story of Isabel Jardin, a strong and sensitive woman, and the men in her life—the stoic Matthew Carney, a living legend, the passionate Gregory Skane, and the innocent but infatuated Jim Sargent. Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of Marina, a wind-swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia, as the characters come to terms with their personal contradictions and the demands of isolated island life.
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The Stories that Haunt Us
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95This latest collection by Maritime Mysteries’ former TV host and actor Bill Jessome includes forty of the best stories collected from around the Maritimes. Using his journalist’s skills, Jessome weaves incredible stories that charm readers and chill our nerves. Maritime Canada has an extensive storytelling tradition and a large part of that storytelling lexicon consists of stories of the supernatural. Many of these stories are told over the generations and Jessome has acquired these chilling accounts by listening to Maritimers at the kitchen table, around the flickering campfire, and when the moon is full.
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Evangeline, Illustrated (English) A Tale of Acadie
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The famous poem with a historical introduction and numerous color and black and white illustrations. First published in 1847, Evangeline is a classic of romantic literature that tells the epic story of a young Acadian couple who are separated during the tragic Acadian expulsion of 1755.
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Tall Tales & Curious Happenings
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95A wonderfully entertaining collection of the best tales of the strange and weird occurrences that have been happening in New Brunswick for years.
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Three Hills Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$32.95Eulalie’s life seems laid out ahead of her, as does Corporal Cully Robin’s, but an alternate plot is about to change their lives irrevocably. With the looming war between France and England, the Governor of Nova Scotia removes the Acadian people from the land they’ve lived on for generations and disperses them throughout the colonies to the south. Suddenly, even the simplest expectations are thrown into doubt as they struggle to survive, love and find their way home in the face of obstacles they could never have imagined.
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More Maritime Mysteries
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95This second book of the spooky, scary and the unexplained by popular Maritime writer Bill Jessome uncovers more strange appearances, occurences and ghostly antics from the Maritimes. These chilling tales and hair-raising spine-tinglers are sure to grip your imagination.
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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. -
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.
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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.
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The Blue Room Poems
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95To get a sense of the significance of Carlo Spinazzola’s work, it is important to see it in the context of the full breath of the artistic undertakings he applied himself to. To see him as just a poet, or musician, or a painter, is to miss the spirit that ran through all his work. He was all these things at once –his artistic output flowed naturally, taking a number of forms, always in the same spirit.His life and his work spoke the same honest message, and this honesty gave all of his endeavours a depth, commitment and truthfulness that is unmistakable. Carlo and his blues lived together, and together they created for us a powerful legacy of words, music, art and memory.Whether his inner torments instigated his creativity or were the necessary payment exacted for his gifts is a moot point, for in the end Carlo succumbed to his demons. In 2003 the blues carried him away at the age of thirty-three.By turns funny, crude and, above all, moving, The Blue Room is the work of a true artist. The poems gathered from notebooks written throughout Spinazzola’s lifetime and the artwork gathered from friends are the expressions of a young artist of our generation.
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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.
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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.
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Beartan Briste
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95Born in Dublin, Ireland, Rody Gorman is Writer-in-Residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye. He has worked as writing fellow at the University College Cork and the University of Manitoba and is editor of the annual Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry anthology An Guth. He has published a wide range of poetry collections and his selected poems in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Chernilo, were published by Coiscéim in 2006.
Beartan Briste is the latest collection from this prolific Gaelic poet. His highly original English “intertongueings” are wonderfully entertaining in their own right – providing insight not only to the nature of his poetry, but the nature of Gaelic interpretation.
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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.
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As A’Bhraighe
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$22.95It has been said that the greatest Gaelic poets were from Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands. Those who emigrated to Nova Scotia in the 18th and 19th centuries were the living memory of clan history and tradition. Allan the Ridge MacDonald stands out as one poet who inherited and maintained an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary and a superior knowledge of clan and legendary history. In this first compilation and translation of the known Gaelic songs of Allan the Ridge in print, Effie Rankin gives all readers an insight into the life of the poet and the traditions that made him a highly regarded seanchaidh.
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The Wedding Reels
Publisher: Breton Books$16.00Not for the faint of heart, Joyce Rankin’s new book returns to the traditional roots she mined for At My Mother`s Door. Now in The Wedding Reels she has gone more to the heart of the moments of grief and doubt that we so often carry alone, and for which we rarely have the words. Eventually, love does abide, and her loyalty to place shines through even the darkest moments life can offer. This is the intimate poetry of the storyteller — frank, clear, unforgettable.“Joyce Rankin`s The Wedding Reels is a collection of poetry whose subjects are as local as a square dance, whose themes are as universal as life itself.” — Frank Macdonald, author of A Forest for Calum.Poet George Elliott Clarke called Joyce Rankin`s best-selling first book “a hymn of survival and settlement.”
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I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything
Publisher: Breton Books$16.00“Controlled, fluid, wry and passionate.” —Halifax Daily NewsA generous serving of new and selected poems. Lesley Choyce was declared “a national treasure” by the Ottawa Citizen and “Nova Scotia’s answer to the Renaissance Man” by CBC’s Peter Gzowski. Quill and Quire found Lesley Choyce’s writing “life enhancing, life celebrating.” For a taste of this lasting collection, you can watch Lesley read the title poem “I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything,” which is available on youtube.
