The Smeltdog Man
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I brushed the crumbs off of the fish and back onto the counter, threw the smelts in the frying pan while I got the eggs out of the fridge and cracked one.”
The Smeltdog Man is the story of how a Cape Bretoner marshalled his accidental invention, a marijuana-induced, munchie-inspired Smeltdog, into the most successful fast food franchise in Canada. As president of his newly formed Good Karma Corporation, he tells the tale of how his business empire grows beyond his control, turning him into a billionaire.
While the business booms and the narrator’s wisdom is being constantly tapped for new ideas and strategies, he consults his Granddaddy Blue, whose pragmatic mixture of horse-trader economics and 1960s hippie ideals provide his grandson with the guiding principles and necessary scams he needs to survive in the corporate world.
From the simplicity of its origins to the ecological disaster of its success, The Smeltdog Man details the influences of country music on our narrator’s understanding of himself, the longing of unrequited love and the accumulation of wealth possessing more zeros than our hero can count.
A Forest for Calum
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The story is Roddie’s. The stage is his guardian and grandfather Calum’s. A quiet and stoic man, Calum Gillies and his aging friends illuminate for us the changing world around them: the loss of the coal mines, the labour strife and lean years endured, the religious parochialism that divides families and communities and, most important, a disappearing language. The setting is Cape Breton; the themes of cultural and rural change and decline are universal.
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.
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.
TR’s Adventure at Angus the Wheeler’s
Artist: Virginia McCoyPublisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95On a warm summer day, ten-year-old T.R. decides to share a secret with his bored brothers, the Terrible Twins and Sunny James. Elves and Fairies live in the garden of their neighbor.
But all is not well in this secret garden; Guks have abducted a Princess and are holding her hostage at a farmhouse known as Angus the Wheeler’s. T.R., the Terrible Twins and Sunny James team up with the Fairies and set out to free the Princess.
What follows is an epic battle between the Fairies and the Guks and T.R. has to use his own gentle magic against a darker magic to free the Princess and protect the Fairies.
Filled with wonder and strong characters—and, best of all, a happy ending—T.R.’s Adventureis supported by colourful and fanciful illustrations making it suitable for young readers and younger audiences.
