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.
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.
Shoot Me
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The 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.”
Are You Kidding Me?! Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95For the first time, sixteen years’ worth of Cape Bretoner Lesley Crewe’s finest newspaper columns are collected in one place. The bestselling novelist, columnist and humorist employs a sharp, versatile wit, anchored by a tender centre, to bring readers laughter and tears. Crewe celebrates life, and all its warts, in this side-splitting, heartwarming collection.
Beholden
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95The story begins with Nell, the “spinster on the hill” near St. Peter’s, Cape Breton. Scarred by her own childhood, she swears she could never love a child and that she will never marry, denying herself a life with the man she loves. She’s proven wrong when a baby is born just down the road from her. Her love of little Jane, despite herself, propels us forward through generations trying to untangle their own traumas and secrets. Eventually, we meet Bridie—joyful, kind, capable Bridie—and see her struggling through the echoing pain of those who came before her. Her choices, her bravery, her “nest of wonderful women,” and her ultimate refusal to settle for anything less than love, eventually redeem her and everyone around her—even the spinster on the hill.
As real as our own family dramas, Beholden is full of Lesley Crewe’s trademark laugh-out-loud moments, heartbreaking losses, incredible women with unbreakable friendships, and the sweet wildness of Cape Breton.
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.”
Mary, Mary
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95In a Cape Breton family of black sheep, Mary is pure as the driven snow. She is patient and kind with her alcoholic grandmother and volatile mother, loyal and attentive to her spoiled cousin, and pleasant and polite all day as a grocery cashier. Her well-off aunt, the only other normal person in the family, wants to help her more, but Mary’s mother is too prickly and proud. So Mary goes to work, comes home, takes care of her family, and wonders if there’ll ever be more to life.
When a young couple moves into the apartment upstairs, it sparks a series of changes that leads to major family revelations, and Mary discovers that sometimes doing the wrong thing is the exact right thing to do.
Tender, authentic, and crackling with Lesley’s irrepressible humour, Mary, Mary is a book for anyone who’s ever had a family—good, bad, or a messy mix of both.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Atlantic Canadian Christmas Reader
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95An Atlantic Canadian Christmas Reader brings together twenty-nine wonderful stories that illustrate some of the region’s unique and time-honoured holiday traditions,from fictional accounts of contemporary family gatherings and feasts to nineteenth-century tales of Christmas at sea. Others describe more modest celebrations, from times when food and money were scarce, and during war years when the only bounty to be found was in the true spirit of the season.
With work by well-known regional storytellers like Helen Creighton, Evelyn Richardson, David Weale, Clary Croft, and Bruce Nunn, and an introduction by Cape Breton novelist Lesley Crewe, An Atlantic Canadian Christmas Readeris the perfect way to add a little Christmas cheer to your bookshelf.
Her Mother’s Daughter
$19.95From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.
Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a teenager and stayed away for years.
And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister’s almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.
When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what’s left of their family forever.
Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother’s Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.
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.
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.Relative Happiness (movie edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn’t trade her life for anything, but at thirty she’s starting to feel like something’s missing.
Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie’s doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie’s peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined.
Lesley Crewe’s funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton-style humour. Filled with heartache without succumbing to it, Relative Happiness is the story of life and love in a small town, of four sisters who love, betray, and rescue each other in turn, and of Lexie Ivy’s joyful awakening. Released as a feature film in 2015.
Her Mother’s Daughter
$19.95From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.
Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a teenager and stayed away for years.
And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister’s almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.
When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what’s left of their family forever.
Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother’s Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.