Stories From the Six Worlds (2nd edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95In Stories from the Six Worlds, it is their stories, passed down by word of mouth, that best preserve and present Mi’kmaw culture. For in their tales, the People themselves speak about their world and give us glimpses of how their universe manifests, in all its fascinating otherness. Mi’kmaw stories have many levels: entertainment, instruction, warnings. They might subtly encode maps of the land’s important resources, or of the wheeling skies at night. Telling stories, Elders wove humour and stark tragedy, terror and beauty, to teach their listeners how to survive. More importantly, they underlined, over and over again, how their listeners, as humans, must conduct themselves. Their tales resound with the universal themes included in any worldview—Order and Chaos, Courage and Fear, Change, Revenge and Mercy, Death, Rebirth, and Power—yet are powerfully rooted in Mi’kmaw tradition, Mi’kmaw land. Their voices still speak to us, down the centuries.
Drawing on various sources, Ruth Holmes Whitehead retells the tales in a voice close to that of the original storytellers. This new edition includes an updated design and the original collection of twenty-nine stories. In Stories from the Six Worlds, Mi’kmaw legends are offered to all people whose search for meaning draws them again to the ancient cultures.
Fishnets & Fantasies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Wendy Hebb has been a fisherman’s wife for forty years. She has also been a mother, a yoga instructor, and part-time soap maker. She loves her life in picturesque Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but it’s just not enough anymore. With a burning entrepreneurial desire, she decides that when her husband, Paul, retires, it will finally be her turn to live out her dream. The catch: her dream is to open a sex shop. While Paul begrudgingly goes along with Wendy’s “half-cocked” idea, it’s out of a sense of guilt; a recently spilled secret has their marriage on the rocks. As soon as the townspeople get wind of Wendy’s plans, it opens up a whole other can of worms—and Paul finds himself bait for the local rumour mill. Her silent, “invisible” partner in the project, he secretly hopes her plan for the shop will fail.
Orbiting around Paul and Wendy’s story is a motley crew of characters, including the Hebbs’ daughter, Ellen, a feminist academic who catches the eye of a lady-killer coworker while home for the summer; Wendy’s best friend, Betty, a chain-smoking seamstress with secrets of her own; the local minister and her husband, who secretly indulge in role play; and the wealthy Sonya and Booth, who will stop at nothing to make sure the shop never opens its doors—as long as they can avoid discussing their failing marriage.
An irreverent novel full of heart and humour, Fishnets & Fantasies is a story of love and lust at any age, of old grudges and older secrets, and of the relationships that make all the awkward fumbling worthwhile.
The Spoon Stealer
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95The main character is born in 1894. The book contains her memoir, so the action goes back and forth in time, including Emmeline’s childhood, through World War One and World War Two and up to “present day,” which is 1968-1969.
The Silence of the Vessel A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I want to be a nun.”
Elspeth, recently retired from Cape Breton University’s Celtic Culture Department, is not sure how to deal with her teenage daughter Cecelia’s outdated and strangely troubling post-secondary plans. Maybe the spiritual inclination Cecelia has would have been welcomed in the past, but with all the scandals the Catholic Church has been going through during recent decades, all Elspeth can do is wonder if it is too early in the day for a glass of wine before responding.
Cecelia has always been a quiet, sometimes even cold child, and Elspeth worries once again if she and Andrew had been too old to raise a menopausal baby. Now as Cecelia approaches high school graduation, and all the decisions that come with that transition, the gap between them seems to be more than merely an age thing.
As she tries to understand her strange desire to become a nun, Cecelia befriends an aging Sister at the Notre Dame congregation at the convent in Mabou. Madonna, a fitting name for a woman who lived a life devoted to God, is in a time of transition as well, struggling with ailments of an aging mind and body. Because of Cecelia’s interest, she tries to piece together the reasons she became a bride of Christ.
Faith, family, and fate bring these three women together. Cecelia is looking for hope in an increasingly fragile world but Madonna’s past, if she can face it, may challenge all of them.
Boy With a Problem
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“…giant storytelling talent unleashed.” —Jon Tattrie, Atlantic Books Today
The daughter of an alcoholic desperate to be loved.
A father reliving a failed dream though his teenaged son.
A struggling immigrant surprised to discover that money does not buy happiness.
A creative boy struggling to please his dead father.
An eco-warrior defying her entire town for what she believes is right.
A father unable to reconcile the assault of his daughter with the world he raised her to believe in.
A gay pastor in self-imposed exile from church and family.
A stranger in a Santa suit dispensing fatherly advice.
A granddaughter who must end the life of the woman who raised her.
A survivor of a small-town drug addict determined to save her cousin from terrifying dreams.
An anxiety sufferer who finds refuge in sadomasochism.
A university student looking for love in all the wrong animal liberation schemes.In sharp, insightful prose, Boy With a Problem taps into the heart of our deeply human fear of failing to truly connect with others. The fissures that erupt between us, how quickly they widen from cracks to chasms—this is the thread running through these wise, raw, and tender stories.
Halifax Nocturne A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95December 1954: the old city in winter wears its two hundred years of grime and vice without any shame. The paint peels from ramshackle homes, and the streets congeal with snow and mud. Weary pedestrians trudge through the bleakness with chins tucked below the collars of threadbare coats. Nothing comes easy to the old city, and nothing ever changes — too many tangled secrets and too many unspoken debts. And yet a new suspension bridge, being built out over the harbour to Dartmouth and set to open in the spring, promises a better tomorrow. Such promised are not easy to keep.
On the street, hard-drinking Halifax police detective Ray Vargas has an unfailing habit for finding trouble, and when a man is found shot to death in the back of a Chevy truck, Vargas finds more trouble than he can handle — the murdered man is his oldest friend and the husband of his lover.
Frank’s death reminds Ray of an unspoken debt left unpaid. He sets off to find a killer in a city that doesn’t much want a killer to be found. At every turn, he encounters lies and danger. With his partner Artie Brennan and friends Ezekiel Dixon and jazz great Louis Armstrong, Ray tries to make sense of the deepening mystery, but hope is hard to come by — at least until he meets Lee White, Frank’s one-time assistant, who might just be his own bridge to a better tomorrow.
Nothing in Halifax is what it seems. As the tension builds, and the stakes grow higher, Ray knows that his own future with Lee depends on his solving the mystery. But to do that, he must make a difficult choice: cross a bridge — or burn it.
Never Speak of This Again
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is 1917 and Nellie, seventeen years old and pregnant, has just returned to Cape Breton from Boston to find her lover. Instead of a safe haven, she encounters rejection and humiliation and is told to clear out and never speak of this again. Nellie’s story reflects the lives of many Nova Scotia women who found their way to Boston. Her world becomes a matter of daily survival, while so many in the world, including the stranger from Truro, try to survive the catastrophic chaos of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Never Speak of This Again takes the reader from eastern Canada to western Canada, to Europe, and back again.
Lucy Cloud
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Filled with engaging characters, with their unique and lively Cape Breton voices, Lucy Cloud follows the fortunes and heartaches of a family with secrets and the intense longing to live fully. Anne Lévesque delivers an authentic tale of a time and a place, where people must be strong and inventive to make a good life.
Homecoming The Road Less Travelled
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In these 13 carefully crafted short stories, Wayne Curtis explores the theme of homecoming, literally, spiritually, and metaphorically, and the many interpretations of the word “home”. The varied characters discover that home can be found in sometimes unlikely places. In “Night Riders” two teenagers find it on the highway in a stolen car, escaping an abusive institution, bonded together through their complicated love for each other. In “The Poet,” a man grasps for familiar old home feelings at a truck stop, where there is country music, drinks, and laughter. In “The Train,” an eleven-year-old boy finds that he longs to return home when his misjudged escape to town teaches him some hard lessons about who can be trusted.
With his characteristic eye for detail and his skillful ability to evoke emotion and atmosphere, Wayne Curtis once again takes readers into a different time, where people long for what makes them feel most anchored, loved, and valued in an ever-changing world.
Caplin Scull Chronicles from a Newfoundland Outport on the Eve of Confederation
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Meet the unique people of Caplin Scull, a small village on Newfoundland’s sea-ravaged east coast, where life is hard and the times are changing as the province of Newfoundland is about to join the nation of Canada. Like the houses, those who live here must be sturdy, courageous and determined, able to withstand a rugged life in a world that still keenly feels the pull of its Irish ancestors and the influence of the powerful Catholic Church.
The collection is part oral history, part narrative, part documentary, part anecdote, all seasoned by time, memory, and reflection, and knitted together with love and a teaspoon or two of invention.
Scars and Other Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“The scar didn’t use to show,” says Daniel, the narrator of the title story. But scars have a way of manifesting themselves, visually or otherwise, and the stories in this collection illustrate a varied compendium of characters marked in some way by their injuries.
Having lost a breast to cancer, a young woman visits a psychic seeking answers to the questions in her life. A bullied boy finds solace in the arrival of another unfortunate who has attracted the attention of his tormentors. A divorced father attempts to shield his young daughter from the trauma of tragedy. An eight-year-old boy witnesses death for the first time, a massage therapist is unnerved by the discovery he makes about a new client, and a young widow flounders in her struggle to cope with the loss of her husband. These and other characters come to vivid life in stories told with the sensitivity and skill that have earned the author continued critical praise.
What a Friend We have in Gloria
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Gloria Belding has just hurled a rock through her neighbour’s window, scattering broken glass in all directions and barely missing Duddy McGill. Now she waits, fogged with drink, for the police to handcuff her and haul her away. She’s been down this road many times and expects to go before a judge, get fined and then get on with her sorry, alcoholic life.
But Gloria is wrong. She gets a chance to turn her life around. In Bruce Graham’s heartwarming and hilarious new book, the final book of the Snake Road trilogy, he takes readers back to the close-knit and quirky community, picking up where Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore left off. It is a story of romance, love and reformation as Gloria discovers the road back to health and happiness is not a straight line. While Gloria learns new survival skills at Carson’s Point, back on the Parrsboro shore, Minnie is struggling to adjust to life after Duddy’s reformation. There’s other news as well. A new arrival has taken up residence in Mink Martin’s trailer and made a “breakthrough” discovery of his own: an artifact of great historical significance.
What A Friend We Have in Gloria is classic Bruce Graham, filled with all the usual weirdness of his kooky characters and the strange goings-on on this twisty little road in rural Nova Scotia. This time, the focus is on Gloria, former lover of Mink Martin, in a story that proves no matter how far down you sink in life, you can rise again.
Nova Scotia Love Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province’s most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound. This collection will convince any reader that love thrives and abides here on the wave-swept shores of Nova Scotia.
A young girl experiences profound attraction to the enigmatic but charismatic Manuel Jenkins in Budge Wilson’s tale; a child tells of having two mothers in Bruce Graham’s short story; and Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron each describe how they met and fell in love, bridging their lives from opposite coasts of Canada. Maureen Hull’s Miranda finds herself in a relationship with a rather unlikely partner; Jim Lotz and Lindsay Ruck tell of real-life love stories: deep, long-standing commitment between two kindred souls, through a lifetime of shared adventures.
There are other jewels here from Jon Tattrie, Steven Laffoley, Sheldon Currie, Harold Horwood, Carol Bruneau, Michael Ungar, William Kowalski, Don Aker, Chris Benjamin, and Lesley Choyce. Collectively, these writers explore many facets of this most human emotion.
In the Country
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In the Country is a collection of Wayne Curtis’s unflinching but lovingly told stories of the hardships of rural life for his generation. Despite an abiding love for the natural settings in which he himself grew up, Wayne describes the restrictions facing young people who yearned for a life beyond the farm. Country life, with its tranquility and beauty, its seasonal rhythms and gifts, also held many boys and girls back from achieving their potential.
The setting is rural New Brunswick in days gone by but not easily forgotten. It is a fictional world where the harsher realities of the time come sharply into focus. The old man in “The Last Hunt,” for example, embodies the dashed dreams and festering frustrations that make this final hunt of his life so charged with emotion. In the title story, a young woman soon realizes the death of her father has put an end to her educational goals as well, for now her duty is to help the family on the farm.
Many young country people wanted to mix easily with their more sophisticated contemporaries, but encountered insurmountable obstacles. Feelings of inferiority and embarrassment were often the result among those who lacked the social skills to navigate town relationships. In “The Falconer Spring,” Wayne captures the palpable longing, excitement but ultimately limitations two cousins experience on a trip to town. The sister in “Of Fall and Winter Rain” pays the ultimate price for her longing and naivété. The stories assembled here are both tragic and tender, told with Wayne’s evocative, precise prose.
Limerence
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Can a man have it all?
The warmth of a solid family and the challenges of a fruitful career?
These questions lie at the heart of Limerence, a fun novel exploring the lives of two people seeking very different ways to be men. One’s a stay-at-home dad, the other a freewheeling libertine. Both struggle with addictions to limerence, that Leonard Cohen longing for something new that drives so many men to leave behind what’s good in pursuit of what seems better.
A car crash in southern Manitoba flings lives apart like planets ejected from the solar system. A man with no future staggers dazed from the wreckage and vanishes. A man with no past arrives in Halifax and creates a new life.
Cain Cohen denies he ever was Sam Stiller, but the past is catching up to his present. People who knew Sam insist he is the same person as Cain, but he rejects them, repeatedly insisting he’s not Stiller. Is he right? Or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?
As the mystery unfolds, the novel probes deeper questions about manhood. Old ideas of how to be a man celebrate the stoic breadwinning father, but they’ve fallen out of our culture. Newer ideas, like taking time off to raise your children, barely make a dent. Men are left to explore the unmapped terrain alone, shaping the future without anyone noticing.
Drawing wisdom from the great Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, William Shakespeare and Steve Perry, Limerence dives deep into the new world of new men and asks: What does it mean to be a man?
Music In the Dark
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Music in The Dark is a compelling novel set in Prohibition-era Montreal when alcohol, drugs and jazz music ruled “Sin City.” Taylor Williams is a young black musician struggling to find fame in the Montreal Harlem District amid gangsters, racism and bootleggers. As a young boy, Taylor escaped a terrifying ordeal that haunts him as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jazz musician.
Tapestry of Green A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carl Cocking had two worthy ambitions: to restore his father’s battered reputation and bring his mother and brothers to some agreement whereby they could call themselves a family. Tapestry of Green is the story of one Englishman who traces the last months of his father’s life through the dark streets of Victorian London to the sampans and opium dens of China. During a quest that he cannot abandon, Carl witnesses the brutality of British trading ships, the Great Trek by the Dutch in South Africa and the beginning of the Opium Wars.
The story takes place in England and China between 1837 and 1843, in the era when hot air and gas balloons were creating great interest in aviation. Artist and inventor Robert Cocking often took his young son Carl on balloon excursions over the English countryside and the city of London where they could look down on a world filled with great filth and great beauty. Carl escapes the unravelling of his family and only returns to London when his father makes aviation history by becoming the first Englishman killed in a parachute accident.
“He is the greatest fool in England, they wrote in their horrid penny papers, and I would not let my father be so remembered.”
Carl tries to reconstruct the last months of his father’s life. His investigation takes him through London’s gentlemen clubs and shabby tenements and on a voyage to the other side of the world to the one man who helped his father design his unique parachute. Carl arrives in China just as the Chinese are rebelling over British intrusions and the supplying of opium to the masses of Chinese.
“On the second day on the Canton River thousands of dead fish floated by, killed by white powder seeping into the water from smashed wooden chests.”
Although Carl is fictional, his father Robert and the Opium Wars are very real.
Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster who, for many years, was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. He is the author of seven books, three of which have been transformed into stage plays. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours is being developed into a television series. His last book, Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was published in 2013, and is now being prepared for the stage. Bruce lives in his hometown of Parrsboro with his wife Helen.
Blue Tattoo A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters – from Boston mayor James Michael Curley to Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer – The Blue Tattoo tells the sweeping story of the lives caught up in the unbelievable devastation of the Halifax Explosion.
Down the Coaltown Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.
Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Duddy McGill is a dreamer –a man who turns his back on reality so often he falls from one disaster into the next. Occasionally, he is given an opportunity, so when no one wants the job, Duddy is appointed the town’s temporary police chief. It’s only for a week but in the first day of the job, Duddy arrests Mrs. Truman Taylor for shoplifting. A prominent citizen, Mrs. Taylor is humiliated and horrified. She resists and ensuing struggle, a dance down Main Street to the jail, happens in front for the astonished townspeople. Unfortunately for Duddy, he has arrested the wrong woman.
He doesn’t have much better luck with Jugs Henderson, who sues him when she falls off her clothesline platform into the petunia patch, or with Mrs. Gordon McKenzie, a widowed schoolteacher who he ends up propositioning. Then there is Mary Lou Weaver, recently moved to Parrsboro because she always wanted to live by the sea. She definitely ends up looking at the water –stuck high above the ground in Duddy’s truck. No wonder Duddy has a few prospects and a very suspicious wife.
Finally, Duddy’s long-suffering wife Minnie has had enough. Out goes her husband and her old life. Yet despite it all, Duddy McGill tries to help people. He is the go-between for the man from Michigan, who has big plans to build a croquet factory in the town, and the local woman he has been searching for. Duddy really wants to do right. He assists his friends when possible. He builds a new deck for Royal after his friend suffers another tragedy and when Mink Martin goes to war with the bureaucracy, Duddy is there to help.
Duddy McGill is a man worthy of salvation. The problem is, he’ll have to do it himself. But fate has a way of intervening, of picking up a small-town guy and making him an international hero. Here is a story of love, absurdity and people with warm hearts. Few writers could make a funeral funny, but it happens here in this story of human folly where you’ll never stop laughing.
Runaway Horses
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the middle of the nineteenth century, a dozen young NovaScotian wild riders were an essential link between the capitalsof the Old World and the New. A news syndicate called theAssociated Press made a deal with Cunard Steamship Linesthat the Royal Mail Ships would carry a news packet to betelegraphed to New York City. A steam launch would speed thepacket across the Bay of Fundy to the nearest telegraph station,at Saint John, New Brunwick. But, despite the modern miraclesof steam power and electromagnetism, the fastest way to carrythe news packet from the Halifax docks to the Fundy shorewould still be relays of galloping horses. The Halifax Expressneeded riders who were light in the saddle yet long-limbed andstrong enough to handle the monster thoroughbreds of the day.Seana McCann is a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant whosefather’s been killed in a far-off war and whose mother sees anescape from potato-grubbing poverty by marrying a wealthyfarmer. It seems clear to Seana that the old farmer’s notjust interested in getting a ready-made family, but in havinga teenage stepdaughter who belongs to him until she turnstwenty-one. But her mother won’t listen to her and intends togo ahead with the marriage. Seana sees no way out, nowhere to run.In another part of the province, a teenage orphan feels that one of the orphanage school priests is taking anunhealthy interest. It seems like a trap with no escape. Then word goes out that a new enterprise called TheHalifax Express is looking for lithe and limber young riders who are good with horses and willing to galloppunishing distances. It seems like an operation that won’t ask too many questions, so long as you can do the job.Maybe a youthful runaway could disappear into the Halifax Express and squirrel away enough wages to have afuture. Maybe even a gawky girl too tall for her age could shear her hair off and pretend to be a boy.Like all of Alfred Silver’s historical novels, Runaway Horsessticks within the historical record and incorporates documentedevents. This story might well have happened exactly as it’s told.A
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.
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.
Use Your Imagination!
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95A woman becomes obsessed with a story about her family from 1890—when a naked, mute girl stumbled onto their property—and whether or not it really happened. A self-help guru and his chief strategist take their most affluent and unstable clients on a harrowing nature hike that destroys their company. A young convict in a prison creative writing class chronicles the rise and fall of his cellblock’s resident peacemaker. A rural neighbourhood becomes obsessed by the coming of a strange and powerful new homeowner who is in the middle of reinventing herself.
The stories of Use Your Imagination! are about stories, about the way we define and give shape to ourselves through all kinds of narratives, true or not. In seven long stories, Kris Bertin examines the complex labyrinth of lies, delusions, compromise, and fabrication that makes up our personal history and mythology. Sometimes funny, strange, or frightening, these stories represent Bertin’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed, award-winning debut, Bad Things Happen.
Anne of Green Gables : The Original Manuscript
Editor: Carolyn Strom CollinsPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95This fascinating book presents the original text of Montgomery’s most famous manuscript, including where the author scribbled notes, made additions and deletions, and other editorial details. L. M. Montgomery scholar Carolyn Strom Collins offers a rare look into Montgomery’s creative process, providing a never-before-published version of the worldwide phenomenon.
This book differs from previous versions of Anne in that it provides a transcription of the text and notes from Montgomery’s original manuscript, and shows how they were integrated to form the full novel. The culmination of years of research, Anne of Green Gables: the Original Manuscript is a necessary addition to any Montgomery lover’s collection. This volume features scans of the first page of each chapter from the original archived document (showing editorial notes in Montgomery’s handwriting) and an appendix of rare foreign-language covers.
A Dark House & Other Stories
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Snap decisions, risky alliances and comical wrong-headedness bring the stories in award-winning author Ian Colford’s latest collection to life. Colford weaves wit and nuance into portrayals of characters facing questions of fortune, fate and self-preservation. Awkward and dangerous situations arise as Colford, dryly yet empathetically, illustrates what happens when people do what they think is best for all.
Making it Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Tinker Gordon doesn’t want anything to change. He thinks that if he holds on tightly enough, his family, his tiny Cape Breton Island community, his very world will stay exactly the way it has always been. But explosions large and small—a world away, in the Middle East, in the land of opportunity in western Canada, and in his own home in Falkirk Cove—threaten to turn everything Tinker has ever known upside down.
Set variously in the heart of rural Cape Breton, on the war-torn streets of Aleppo and in a Turkish refugee camp, in the new wild west frontier of the Alberta oil patch, and in a tiny apartment in downtown Toronto, Tinker’s family, friends, and neighbours new and old must find a way to make it home.
In her adult fiction debut, Alison DeLory ponders a question as relevant in Atlantic Canada as anywhere in the world: where and how do we belong, and what does it take to make it home?
A Soldier’s Place
$19.95For two decades following the First World War, Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity—until now.
Carefully curated by author and editor Thomas Hodd, A Soldier’s Place is an anthology of fifteen of Bird’s best combat stories, based on the experiences of himself and of others, covering all aspects of the war effort and following brave Canadian, American, and Australian soldiers.
An infantry soldier, Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and became one of the most prolific Canadian authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works.
Winter Atlantic Canadian Stories
Editor: Dan SoucoupPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Some Canadians greet winter with a cold shoulder, while others celebrate the snow and ice. One thing we can all agree on: winter brings ideal reading weather. Spanning decades, this collection from author and anthology editor Dan Soucoup (The Finest Tree) shares the inherent warmth of the chilly season in a uniquely Atlantic Canadian way–with grit, good humour, and moving sentimentality.
From Thomas Raddall’s 1910 story of a young widow lost in a snowstorm on a frozen river to Alden Nowlan’s retelling of a Mi’kmaw legend about a man who loathed winter, these stories explore every face–good and bad–of the wintry season. A blend of fact and fiction spanning the region, from Labrador to Yarmouth, Winter: Atlantic Canadian Stories brings voices old and new together to celebrate the season of natural storytelling.
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.
