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dePictions Editorial Cartoons by Michael de Adder
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Award-winning editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder presents his favourite cartoons from the past six years. The over 100 colour cartoons included here run the gamut from national politics to regional affairs and international controversies. Includes a foreword from the Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s Bruce MacKinnon.
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Duffy Stardom to Senate to Scandal
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Mike Duffy made his name as a political reporter, and in the process became one of Prince Edward Island’s most famous exports. He cast himself as the ultimate insider, Parliament Hill’s man in the know. It made him a household name and one of the Canada’s bestÂpaid journalists. But Duffy wanted to get even closer and lobbied his way into the Canadian Senate, with dire results. Veteran journalist Dan Leger tells the story of Duffy’s rise to the top in Canadian media, his entanglement with the Harper Conservatives, and the scandal that made him one of the most controversial figures in contemporary politics. This paperback edition includes a new chapter on the 2015 expenses trial, a foreword by CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, and an 8-page colour photo insert.
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Andrew Cobb Architect and Artist
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Andrew Cobb (1876–1943) is synonymous with early twentieth-century architecture in Atlantic Canada. Founder of the Nova Scotia Architectural Association, Cobb designed some of the region’s most renowned landmarks, including Kings College in Halifax, Mount Allison University’s Memorial Library in New Brunswick, and the town site of the Newfoundland Power and Paper Company in Corner Brook. With many of his buildings still standing strong as they approach their centenary, the legacy of Andrew Cobb continues today. More than half a century after Cobb’s death, author Janet Kitz provides a detailed visual biography of the man behind the buildings. Features over 100 modern and archival photographs and forewords from Syd Dumaresq and Graeme F. Duffus.
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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.
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A Distorted Revolution How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton, and Me
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95In this narrative history and memoir, journalist, musician, and Monctonian Jason Murray follows the rise of the band that put the Maritimes on the map.
Eric’s Trip was a band defined as much by its DIY ethos as its low-fi, discordant music. The four-piece formed in an early-’90s Moncton basement and in a few short years, went from recording themselves on a four-track and selling cassettes at local record stores to signing on Seattle’s Sub Pop records, opening for Sonic Youth, and touring internationally.
Twenty years after the band’s breakup (1996), A Distorted Revolution is the ultimate nostalgia trip. Through personal recollections, interviews with band members and others integral to the early 90s scene, this highly anticipated book offers a rare glimpse inside the band’s formation, success, and ultimate unravelling. Includes over 20 images.
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Last Lullaby
$21.95Set in the fictional town of Paddy’s Arm, Newfoundland, Alice Walsh’s debut mystery novel is at once harrowing and homey, equal parts police procedural and diner gossip. When Claire and Bram’s only child dies suddenly, it at first appears to be a case of crib death. But when the real cause of death indicates homicide and Claire is arrested as the number-one suspect, her friend, lawyer Lauren LaVallee, promises she’ll do everything she can to prove Claire’s innocence.
As Lauren combs Paddy’s Arm for suspects, amid department politics and small-town talk, leads abound. Why are professors Frances and Annabelle being so secretive about their adopted daughter? What’s behind a troubled student’s sudden disappearance? And who is the mysterious platinum blonde observed at the scene of the crime? Meanwhile, Lauren’s own secret—a case that almost cost her her career back in Montreal—and the sudden return of an ex-lover who wants back in her life, threaten to overwhelm the investigation altogether.
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Catching the Light
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The kids call her Lighthouse: no lights on up there. In a small town, everyone knows when you can’t read. But Cathy is just distracted by the light, lines, and artistry of everyday life. She is a talented artist growing up in tiny Mariners Cove and yearns for acceptance. She dreams of enrolling in art school, but getting there will be a struggle. Hutch Parsons is everything Cathy is not: charismatic, popular, smart. Overflowing with energy, he is confident in his plans for the future. But one icy evening his world is upended and those plans are swept away.
Dancing between points of view, Catching the Light explores the ordinary lives of two extraordinary people. With gorgeously lyrical language and a strong sense of place, this tender novel announces a bright new voice in Atlantic fiction. Winner of the 2014 Percy Janes First Novel Award for an unpublished manuscript.
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Hangman’s Beach
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95A skilful blend of romance and historical fact woven about Halifax, Nova Scotia, while the Napoleonic Wars were shaking the world. A few miles away on Melville Island, a French prisoner daily faces the agonizing question: What would be his fate if the British discovered that he had shot and killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar?
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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-Âoff 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.
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Purple for Sky
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Mayhem unfolds and loyalties unravel in a tightly knit clan of Bible-thumping shopkeepers when the formidable Ruby Clarke develops dementia, and a secret is revealed about her mother that shatters ties binding Ruby’s niece, Lindy Hammond, to the failing family business. Set in a shrinking community in northern Nova Scotia—a town that a century ago was an industrial hub—this unforgettable novel interweaves the lives of three women from three generations and of the husbands, lovers, and customers who cross them. Past and present come to life in this rich, award-winning story that blends humour and grit, realism and the magic of everyday things, as colourful as the crazy quilt cherished by its characters.
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Grandfather’s House Returning to Cape Breton
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Grandfather’s House is Clive Doucet’s follow-up to My Grandfather’s Cape Breton, published in 1980 and continuously in print. Now a grandfather himself, Doucet muses about this role. While he believed as a child that to be a grandfather was to own a farm by the sea, he now realizes that his job as a grandfather is to tell stories. In doing so, he traces the history of the Doucets back to Acadie, then to the early years of the Cape Breton village of Grand Étang and to modern-day Ottawa.
Doucet’s musings are interspersed with poetry, short stories, and with summer adventures with his grandchildren in Grand Étang. He paints a loving portrait of his grandfather’s village and the people, past and present, who make it a vibrant community. The themes of resilience and rejuvenation permeate the memoir, which is both rooted in nostalgia and filled with hope for a more sustainable future.
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In Their Own Words
$21.95What was the First World War really like for Maritimers overseas? This epistolary book, edited by historian Ross Hebb, contains the letters home of three Maritimers with distinct wartime experiences: a front-line soldier from Nova Scotia, a nurse from New Brunswick, and a conscripted fisherman from Prince Edward Island. Up until now, these complete sets of handwritten letters have remained with the families, who agreed to share them in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War’s end in 2018. These letters not only give insight into the war, but provide greater understanding of life in rural Maritime communities in the early 1900s.
In Their Own Words includes a learned introduction and background information on letter writers Eugene A. Poole, Sister Pauline Balloch, and Herry Heckbert, enabling readers to appreciate the context of these letters and their importance.
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Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Eco-Innovators profiles some of the region’s most innovative and forward-thinking leaders in sustainability. These entrepreneurs and educators, activists and agitators, farmers and fishers have all made measurable contributions both in their respective fields of interest and in motivating others to make change.
In the book, we meet Kim Thompson, a strawbale builder and consultant, who has recently brought her building experience to a renovation of an older house in downtown Halifax. Then there’s Edwin Theriault, who bought a bale of clothing back in 1971 and launched Frenchy’s, a chain of seventy-six used-clothing stores that has become an East Coast institution. Edwin doesn’t consider himself an environmentalist at all, but over the years his business has kept countless tonnes of material out of landfills. Also profiled are Speerville Flour Mill and Olivier Soaps in New Brunswick, Sean Gallagher of Local Source in Halifax, David and Edith Ling of Fair Acre Farm on PEI, and Jim Meaney of Cansolair solar heat air exchangers in Newfoundland, among many others.
With ten chapters on matters like reducing consumption, greening the home, sustainable eating, dressing, transportation, and vacationing, the book is an important look into the lives of Atlantic Canadians committed to creating viable green options in our region.
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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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Mayann’s Train Ride
Artist: Tamara Thiébaux-HeikaloPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Nine-year-old Mayann Francis and her family are travelling from their home in Cape Breton to New York City by train. Everything is exciting to young Mayann, from the beds that fold down to the stop in Montreal to visit friends. Most exciting of all is the chance to show off her brand new purse.
When the Francis family arrives in big, bustling New York City, Mayann visits with relatives, goes to the zoo, and rides the subway. She even receives a beautiful black doll, something she has never seen before. But one subway ride, she loses her beautiful purse. At first she’s heartbroken, but she just might learn a lesson that makes the whole trip worthwhile.
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Taste of the Maritimes
$22.95Contemporary Maritime cuisine reflects both a rich history of seasonal home-cooking with fresh, local ingredients as well as modern flavour influences from around the world. A Taste of the Maritimes is a collection of vibrant new recipes that showcase the best on offer from our fields, orchards, and waters throughout the year. Author Elisabeth Bailey illuminates the joys of local, seasonal eating, presenting each recipe in a casual yet cordial style, with photographs that capture the essence of local flavour.
Broken into five chapters–spring, early and late summer, fall, and winter–the book’s easy-to-follow recipes are interspersed with profiles of local farmers and suppliers including Fox Hill Cheese, Ironworks Distillery, and Speerville Flour Mill. With recipes such as Fiddleheads and Bacon in spring, Balsamic Honey Fruit Salad and Inside-Out Dragn Burgers in summer, Heritage Bean Chili in fall, and Slow-Roasted Turkey in Juniper Brine for the holidays, A Taste of the Maritimes celebrates the seasons in delectable style.
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White Point Then and Now Ninety Years of Making Memories
Photographer: Len WaggPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95John and Anne Sun first came to White Point in 1993 when they were dating, and they are still coming back, now with five children, including quadruplets. It is the tranquility of the south shore resort that appeals to the Suns of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. Others enjoy the ocean, the stone fireplaces, and the famous bunnies. This book captures the magic and the memories of White Point, which opened in 1928 and has survived storms, both real and financial. What started as a seasonal destination for the well-to-do from outside Atlantic Canada has turned into a year-round operation that welcomes everyone. How has the resort changed? How has it stayed the same? Photographer Len Wagg skillfully contrasts the thens and the nows of White Point with over 60 charming photos, and Rick Conrad incorporates the memories of guests and staff.
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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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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.”
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Mona Parsons
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Even as a young girl growing up in Nova Scotia, Mona Louise Parsons stood out for her elegance and theatrical flair. But the life of this Wolfville native has always overshadowed her stage roles. From a Nova Scotian childhood, she became a 1920s New York chorus girl, a Depression-era nurse, a prisoner of the Nazis, and an escaped, emaciated fugitive who walked across Nazi Germany in the dying months of World War II.
The process of uncovering the story of Mona Parsons took almost as many twists and turns as the life it was piecing together. This book traces the author’s own journey as she follows clues from Wolfville to New York to Europe and back, leaping across oceans and decades with imagination and grace.
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If You Could Wear My Sneakers
Artist: Darcia LabrossePublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95A Sheree Fitch classic, the Silver Birch and Hackmatack Award-winning children’s picture book about children’s rights, If You Could Wear My Sneakers, is now available for a new generation of young readers. A series of humorous poems, paired with timeless illustrations, interprets 15 of the 54 articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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The Snow Knows
Artist: Josée BisaillonPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The snow knows
where the rabbit goes.
It knows the hushÂshush
of the owl’s wing.In this deceptively simple children’s picture book, a pair of awardÂwinning storytellers share the joys of winter. A lyrical prose poem, The Snow Knows introduces readers of all ages to animals both domestic (a tabby cat by the wood stove) and wild (a slinking lynx; a choir of coyotes), celebrating wilderness and outdoor play.
With whimsical hideÂandÂseek illustrations, readers will love following footprints and catching a glimpse of an owl’s wing or pheasant’s feathers, suggesting what appears on the following page. A beautiful book, destined to be a perennial winter favourite, and read aloud by a crackling fire.
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The Land Beyond the Wall An Immigration Story
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Emma lives on the grey, cold, lonely side of a wall, where people speak in whispers and no flowers grow. On the other side, there is happiness and colour, but she can never go there. When Emma’s parents disappear, she is sent to live with her Aunt Lily, who, “just like the land withered from lack of sunshine, was broken by the life she led.” One day, Aunt Lily discovers Emma drawing and dashes her niece’s dream of becoming an artist. That is, until one day, when a strange boat captain, and an even stranger boat, arrive, and she leaves her world behind forever.
Following Emma’s arrival in a strange land (Halifax’s Pier 21), her placement in a group home, and the discovery of her voice through art, The Land Beyond the Wall is a beautifully rendered allegory that uses magic realism to confront the harsh realities of immigration, and the universal struggle of finding one’s voice, and one’s place in the world.
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The Flying Squirrel Stowaways From Halifax to Boston
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95It’s wintertime in Nova Scotia and two flying squirrels are busy exploring the woods around their spruce-tree home. After a busy night of playing and gliding and snacking, they’re ready to settle down and sleep all day.
But humans have other plans: the tree is cut down and packed onto a truck bound for Boston, Massachusetts. Turns out their new home has been chosen as Halifax’s annual thank-you gift, the Boston Christmas Tree. The little squirrels have no idea they’re about to embark on a journey across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine on the way to Boston. Will the accidental stowaways be discovered? And what awaits them in their new American home?
From the author and illustrator of Jigs and Reels comes a vibrantly illustrated, fun holiday story about curiosity, adventure, and making a new home.
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A Harbour Seal in Halifax
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Seal went for a stroll…
The icy puddles were too small for swimming
The rocks were too tall for climbing.
Seal saw bright lights. They sparkled.
Seal liked the snow.
One snowy night in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia, a strange figure peeks out from behind a parked car. A woman screams! So begins a lost harbour seal’s adventure through the steep streets of the sleepy winter city. Soon, Constable and Officer are on the case, and if they work together, they just might be able to help the harbour seal find his way back home.
Celebrated children’s author and illustrator Doretta Groenendyk brings the true story of Halifax’s famous winter 2015 flipÂslippery visitor to life with colourful paintings and simple text. A Harbour Seal in Halifax is destined to become a local family favourite.
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The Walking Bathroom
Artist: Erin Bennett BanksPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95It’s Halloween and Amayah doesn’t have a costume to wear to school. She dressed as a ghost for the last three years in a row, witches are overdone, and fairies are not her style. She wants to be something different, something creative, something no one else in the world has ever been in the history of Halloween.
A sweet story of standing out and fitting in, The Walking Bathroom is the newest book from award-winning author and spoken-word poet Shauntay Grant (Up Home). With fun, vibrant artwork from Erin Bennett Banks (Change of Heart), this imaginative tale is bound to inspire some unique costumes and become a Halloween favourite!
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Bluenose Cookbook
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The Bluenose Cookbook includes famous Yarmouth recipes with a strong emphasis on seafood. Most are traditional recipes from the southernmost part of Nova Scotia. Originally published in 1965, this 4th edition has been reprinted many times.
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Taste PEI
Photographer: Anne MacKayPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Wayne 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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Cape Breton Tastes
$22.95Mouth-watering recipes from twenty eight of Cape Breton’s best restaurants.
Cape Breton Tastes presents but a sample of the food available on the island of Cape Breton. If the recipes from local restaurants don’t whet your appetite, then the vivid colour photographs of these dishes surely will. Featuring restaurants from all over the island map-from Ingonish to Arichat-this book is your guide whether you are looking for a bowl of chowder and a homemade biscuit or a hearty meal of lamb, pork,
or roasted goose. Of course, don’t leave without tasting the wondrous bounty of the island’s seas and rivers, or one of the fine desserts worth lingering over. Whatever dish you choose, you won’t be disappointed.
This book features twenty-eight different restaurants from around the island, and includes recipes for starters, soups, meat, seafood, pasta, and desserts.
