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Working from Home for a Harmonious Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Since Luc Desroches began working from his home office in 2016, he has been writing about how the move has allowed him to create a more harmonious life for both himself and his family. This book was mostly written pre-COVID-19, when working from home was more the exception than the rule. With almost every employee on the planet being encouraged to work from home where possible, COVID-19 has made the necessary transition from office to home more important than ever. Although there’s an explosion of teleworking articles with best practice tips, the author delves much deeper into the personal experience as he reflects on the values and teachings of the Mi’kmaq people who have worked from their homes for over ten thousand years.
The deeper messages of the book are perennial, which is what we need as we face unprecedented challenges. Now is an opportunity for millions of people to make a more informed decision on whether they should continue working from home or return to their pre-COVID workplaces. Now is a potential tipping point that could lead to a happier and healthier life for the individual and for society as a whole.
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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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L’Nu’k: The People Mi’kmaw History, Culture and Heritage
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The Mi’kmaq lived in Canada long before the country even got its name. Before Europeans arrived, they lived in homes called wigwams and hunted and fished throughout the Maritime provinces, living off and giving back to the land. They enjoyed storytelling, drumming, and dancing within their tightknit communities.
In L’nuk: the Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada, First Nations educator Theresa Meuse traces the incredible lineage of today’s Mi’kmaq people, sharing the fascinating details behind their customs, traditions, and history. Discover the proper way to make Luski (Mi’kmaw bread), the technique required for intricate quillwork and canoebuilding, what happens at a powwow, and how North America earned its Indigenous name, Turtle Island.
Includes informative sidebars, highlighted glossary terms, recommended reading, a historic timeline, index, and over 60 fullcolour historical and contemporary images.
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Unspoken Truth Unmuted and Unfiltered
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95With strength and resilience, Africans have persevered through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and were able to rebuild a life after slavery while enduring the inhumane conditions of the civil rights Jim Crow era forced upon them by the African diaspora. The lack of acknowledgement of the generational trauma these events have had on their descendants continues to create further injury. Even today, barriers prevent their healing and transition from survival to a thriving existence.
Unspoken Truth is a bold collection of poetry highlighting the generational pain of Africans living in the diaspora. Through her poems, Bowden creates a panoramic view of the terrible conditions they endured for centuries. Deliberately, with dignity, she brings the trauma stories of African Nova Scotians told around kitchen tables for decades to the homes of readers while restoring the balance of humanity and royalty from which the African journey began. Despite all odds, they were able to preserve their lineage and lean on the resilience buried deep in their souls while passing this pride, culture, and strength on to future generations so they may one day fulfill the hopes and the dreams of the former slaves.
This collection seeks to spark the necessary conversations the larger society needs to engage in around the perseverance of systemic racism, a society now grappling to make the connections between historical trauma and current-day conditions of inequality. It summons the conscience of every reader to acknowledge the truth and reconcile it with their own dissonance. The poems pay homage to the ancestors, honour the elders, and provide inspiration for the youth so they can heal from this historical inheritance and build upon their own narratives.
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Le colosse des neiges de Campbellton
Artist: Paul RouxPublisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$19.95Gabriel, Ania and Mamadou, followed by their faithful dog, are on a ski vacation in Campbellton. But soon, they find themselves scouting a terrifying beast up frozen paths and towards a splendid mansion nestled near Mount Sugarloaf. The owner is a likeable Swiss chocolate millionaire, however Ania, the know-it-all of the young detective trio, is not buying his story. Will the skills of the ‘Three Musketeers’ finally falter on their 7th adventure?
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The Thundermaker
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy’s The Thundermaker is based on Alan’s spectacular mixed-media exhibit of the same name. In the book, Big Thunder teaches his son, Little Thunder, about the important responsibility he has making thunder for his people. Little Thunder learns about his Mi’kmaw identity through his father’s teachings and his mother’s traditional stories. Syliboy’s spectacular, vibrant artwork brings the story of Little Thunder to vivid life.
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Nova Scotia Book of Lists
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95Humans love lists. As humourist writer H. Allen Smith once wrote, “The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.” That infatuation with lists continues here. From Nova Scotia’s great collector comes a masterful collection of lists that will start family arguments, provoke a wry smile, or just generally entertain on a cold winter night or in the dog days of summer.
In The Nova Scotia Book of Lists find out:
•Joe Canada’s Top10 qualities that define a “real” Nova Scotian.
• Natalie MacMaster’s wish list of the Top 10 Nova Scotians she would like to perform for.
•Jimmy Rankin’s 10 favourite songs ever performed by a Nova Scotian.
•JC Douglas’ list to Top 10 bands or performers to ever come out of Nova Scotia.
•Dan Soucoup’s list of Nova Scotia’s 10 best books.
•Darryll Walsh’s Top 10 haunted places in Nova Scotia.
•Len Wagg’s 10 best places in Nova Scotia to photograph.
•Joan Dawson’s 10 most memorable back roads she’s ever travelled in Nova Scotia.
•Michael de Adder’s list of the top Nova Scotians that a political cartoonist likes to draw.
•Michael Haynes’ list of Nova Scotia’s best trails.
•Pete Luckett’s 10 top choices of Nova Scotian products he likes to see on a menu when he dies out.
•Gerry Doucet’s top 10 fishing holes in Nova Scotia. -
My Grandfather’s Cape Breton (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95This is the timeless story of a young boy and his grandfather. It is a voyage of discovery that starts for both of them when young Clive arrives one summer at his grandfather’s farm in Cape Breton. Clive, with all the uncertainty of approaching adolescence, has only the vaguest impression of what a cow looks like and what is expected of him. Under the gentle guidance and wry wit of his Acadian grandfather he learns how to gallop a horse without falling off, how to save the hay crop from from an approaching storm, and how to assist with the birth of a calf. This is a story of Grand Étang, a humorous, sensuous vibrant place, and of a boy growing up wise one summer in Cape Breton.
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One Potato Two Potato
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95The definitive book about potatoes, from growing them to eating them and everything in between. A cookbook and more with special emphasis on Prince Edward Island’s unique role in Canada’s potato industry.
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Historic St Andrews
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95St.Andrews-by-the-Sea is a much photographed little town, beloved by visitors and residents.The visual heritage of the town and the surrounding community has been documented by many photographers and reproduced here with historical context.
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Captains, Mansions and Millionaires
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95Today is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the prosperity that Maitland enjoyed as a shipbuilding and trading centre during the late 1800s. Fortunes were made in the timber trade, in mining gypsum, and selling Maitland ships. In one summer, nineteen ships were built for a revenue of nearly one million dollars. A thousand men worked in the shipyards of this town on the shores of Cobequid Bay, requiring hotels, boarding houses, taverns, clothing stores, hardware stores and a bank.
Maitland sea captains like W.D Lawrence sailed the globe in huge schooners. A railway was built; there was a telegraph, professional photographer, and eventually a six-car ferry. There were tennis courts, and glorious mansions furnished with the finest articles money can buy.
And then it ended. The golden age of wooden ships and iron men was over, and the economic engine that generated such wealth faltered. The halcyon days of Maitland disappeared but its heritage not forgotten. Much of the town, including its great homes, still stands as it did in the glory days. Maitland has been declared a heritage conservation site, to be preserved for future generations.
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Historic Sussex
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95First a settlement for the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq peoples and later a safe haven for American Loyalist immigrants in the eighteenth century, Sussex was not incorporated as a town until after the establishment of a railway station in 1895. In Historic Sussex, author Elaine Ingalls Hogg has collected over 150 historical images from Sussex’s beginnings up to the Second World War, including photos of the town’s famed agricultural producers, its businesses, and its military encampment, Camp Sussex. Named as Canada’s “typical small town” by the CBC in 1956, Sussex has a rich history that comes alive in this new entry in the popular Images of Our Past series.
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Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
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Acadian Lives
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95The Cape Breton Acadian comes alive in this new collection of conversations with remarkable people in an extraordinary place-Acadians of Cape Breton Island. In their own words, this book is a marvelous introduction to their humour, passion, work life and heritage. From fishing life to the cooperative movement, from daily life to sorcery and celebrations-their words and photographs open a door to an intimate portrait of this unique, little-known world. Acadian Lives is a tribute to the tenacity, pride, ingenuity and wit of one of Cape Breton Island’s undeniable treasures. In English, with some French tales and songs.
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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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Prince Edward Island True Colours
Photographer: Anne MacKay, Wayne BarrettPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Wayne Barrett and Anne MacKay are a professional photographic team that have published numerous books including True Colors A Writer’s Garden, and the award winning Spirit of Place. They live in St. Catherines, Prince Edward Island.
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Somebody’s Daughter
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95First released in 1996, Somebody’s Daughter takes us inside the lives of real players in Canada’s prostitution game. This book is about what we don’t know about prostitution and perhaps what we don’t want to know; what goes on inside that violent underworld know as The Game, and who the girls in the tight skirts really are. Author and reporter Phonse Jessome traces the short careers of several young girls actively recruited by pimps and describes the anti-pimping efforts of law enforcers who work to get teenage girls out the The Games and off the streets.
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Wild Nova Scotia (pb)
Photographer: Len WaggPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Nova Scotia has designated thirty-three Crown-owned areas as Wilderness Areas, consisting of about five percent of the provincial land-mass. The wilderness area designation means no mining or logging is allowed, but people are free to hunt, fish, hike, and camp as they have for generations. These Wilderness Areas- from the massive Tobeatic Wilderness Area that covers five counties to tiny McGill Lake- showcase the best of natural Nova Scotia, and Len Wagg has photographed them all for Wild Nova Scotia. Over the last year and a half, Wagg spent close to a hundred days in the province’s wilderness, logging over fifteen thousand kilometres and taking beautiful, telling portraits of the province’s most secret and lovely places. Photos of important areas not designated Wilderness Areas are included as well- like the shores of the Northumberland Strait, where herds of seals find places along the shores to have their young; the Bay of Fundy, where world-class tides erode massive cliffs; Keji National Park, where the sounds campers hear are all natural; and Nova Scotia’s “barren” Sable Island, home to birds, plants, seals and a herd of wild horses. Each area has distinctive characteristics that make it unique. Wild Nova Scotia showcases the special places, protected or not, allowing people to bring home some of the amazing natural beauty of this province.
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Waterfalls (new edition) Nova Scotia’s Masterpieces
Photographer: Donna BarnettPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Waterfalls: Nova Scotia’s Masterpieces presents striking photographs from forty-two of the province’s most spectacular and inspirational falls. Driving directions and detailed descriptions of the access points and surrounding trails allow any nature lover to successfully appreciate these masterful gifts of wildness.
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Prince Edward Island Pictorial Cookbook
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The combination of beautiful Prince Edward Island photographs and the wonderful recipes of fresh food from the Island is simply irresistible.
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Ships and Men
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95A new collection of some of the best writing from Capt. John Parker, including the life and death of his deep-sea commercial vessel (St. Clair Theriault) and his classic history of wooden shipbuilding throughout Cape Breton Island.
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Song of Rita Joe Autobiography of a Mi’kmaw Poet
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95Song of Rita Joe is a book of exceptional courage and insight, the words of a gentle woman who fought for her family, justice, and her own independent voice. She faced intolerance, ignorance, and abuse, searched her inheritance for strength, and wrote poems of clarity and encouragement that continue to inspire not only her people but all people.
Finally, she was a humble woman, an honoured Mi’Kmaw elder, poet, and member of the Order of Canada.
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The Mi’kmaq Anthology
Editor: Rita JoePublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95A varied and spiritual collection of work by the Mi’kmaq writers of Atlantic Canada. Both young and old stories and storytellers combine talents to produce short stories, poetry, and personal essays.
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The Mi’kmaq Anthology Volume 2 In Celebration of the Life of Rita Joe
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Theresa Meuse is the former chief of Bear River First Nation and has worked in various jobs with Mi’kmaq organizations. She is an educator and advisor and author of a children’s book, The Sharing Circle. Lesley Choyce is the publisher of Pottersfield Press, an English instructor in Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program and the author of several books.
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The Electric City
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95This is the true story of the Stehelins, a prestigious family from Normandy, France, who came to Nova Scotia in the early twentieth century to carve out a new life in the wilderness. The family’s achievements were legendary–they built their own railway and installed their own electricity to the incredulity of all those around. Their amazing tale of creating an “electric city” in the wilds of Nova Scotia is the stuff of romance, challenge, and intrigue.
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Views from the Steel Plant
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95Jimmy Hines is just one of the many voices that tell stories of Cape Breton’s 100-year adventure in Steel. Told with passion and conviction, Views from the Steel Plant is a proud, vigorous collection of memories of steel plant life. Along with historic photographs, here are stories of racism, bigotry and brotherhood-women who did the dirtiest work, keeping the plant alive while the men were at war-the fight for union and the community protest to save the embattled plant. Steelworkers talk about the skill and courage, about hard work in a hot, threatening and very productive twentieth century industry.
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Rise Again
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95The first full-scale history of Cape Breton Island in nearly 150 years!
RISE AGAIN! Is the story of Cape Breton Island told by beloved historian, archivist, and teacher Robert Morgan. From the geological roots to Mi’kmaw life before discovery, the planting of French Louisbourg, and the island’s first economic boom, this is a rich and accessible new book.
Morgan takes us from the battle for control of the island and Britain’s deliberate schemes to withhold opportunities for significant growth, through the opening of Cape Breton to provide a new home for the Loyalists, the forced marriage of the Colony of Cape Breton to the Colony of Nova Scotia and with it the birth of the never-ending Separatist movement. Book One takes the reader through the 19th century and sees Cape Breton as a new home for the Acadians, the Irish, and the Scottish, preparing the ground for the second economic boom as world markets were found for Cape Breton’s coal and then steel. A marvellous book, built to last. -
Historic Bathurst
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Historic Bathurst offers an intimate look at life as it once was in this northern New Brunswick town. Summoning up its early days with an abundance of archival images, this book presents Bathurst’s past as home of salmon runs, a bountiful lumbering business, and as an important trading post along the remote Bay of Chaleur and documents the changes brought by the early twentieth century. Authur A.J. McCarthy has depicted, in images and words, the history of Bathurst’s people, the great rivers of the region, its streetscapes, bridges, and buildings, as well as its industries such as mining, the pulp mills, and the railway.With over one hundred images, this book is a one-of-a-kind keepsake, bringing back the people, history, and spirit of Bathurst.
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Historic Shelburne
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Sarah Acker holds a bachelor of arts degree with concentrations in English and history from St. Francis Xavier University. A native of Shelburne, she has long had an interested in the communities history, and is currently working as a researcher with the Shelburne County Museum.
Lewis Jackson holds a bachelor of arts degree with honours in history from the University of Western Ontario, a bachelor of education degree from Queens University, and has undertaken graduate studies in history at Carleton University. A former Ottawa-based historical consultant and researcher, he teaches and writes in his hometown of Shelburne. -
Historic Amherst
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95It is hard to ignore the past in a town like Amherst in northern Nova Scotia. The setting fir the Leon Trotsky’s internment in one of Canada’s largest World War One prisoner-of-war camps and for Henry George Ketchum’s unusual plans to build a ship railway, Amherst has witnessed the rise-and sometimes fall- of personal fortunes and revolutionary dreams. Once the battleground for the historic struggle between the English and the French, it has been called home by notable figures of all kinds, including four fathers of Confederation and renowned artist Alex Colville.
Historic Amherst looks at the fascinating evolution of the small community of “Morse’s Corner” into “Busy Amherst,” an Industrial centre for the production of steel, iron and automobiles at its peak in the early 1900s. Supported by priceless photographs that testify to Amherst’s early prosperity as well as to its social, sporting, recreational and agrarian past, this illustrated history promises to inform and delight as it traces the significant moment in this once-bustling bordertown.
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Historic Queens County
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The region around Liverpool and Queens County itself is one of the most historic areas of Nova Scotia. Its wide harbours, fisheries, abundant timber and waterways attracted the attention of the early European fishermen and fur traders as well as the American settlers from New England who, in 1759 settled Liverpool. By 1766, the enterprising residents had constructed three water-powered sawmills and established trade links back to New England, as well as to Halifax, the West Indies and Europe. A few infamous Privateers fitted out in Liverpool were the Wolverine, Shannon, and the most successful of all, and best known, the Liverpool Packet. The author compiled this collection from a large number of old photographs from the 1880s until World War Two and provides a vivid portrait of Queens County’s past. An unrivalled visual history of Liverpool.
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The Little Dutch Village
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The historic and quaint village built by early German settlers on the outskirts of Halifax was mis-named Dutch for Deutsche, is a district rich in historic association. This is a fascinating account of the village through vintage photos.
