The body of Pastor Sandy Gardner, a TV preacher with a global following, turns up near a Halifax container pier. The mysterious case lands with Cam Neville, a city cop with a dead wife, PTSD, and a haunting past. Can Neville, a former biker and war hero, solve the killing and find himself?
In search of the truth, Neville and his partner, a Mi’kmaw Mountie named Blair Christmas, enter a perilous world of strippers, kiddie porn, and corruption that threatens to destroy them. Meanwhile, Neville is torn between loyalties to his two brothers, one still with the Satan’s Stallion bike club founded by their father, and another, a priest who wants to save everyone, including Cam.
In Disposable Souls, author Phonse Jessome has created a complex and compelling protagonist and placed him in a gritty underbelly of bikers, cops, and killers, masterfully blurring the lines between good and bad, sinners and saints.
With all the wisdom, humor and joy we’ve come to expect from Sheree Fitch, Kiss the Joy As It Flies, first published in 2008, marked the well-loved author’s move from children’s literature to adult fiction.
Set in the fictional Maritime town of Odell, with a cast of exasperating but lovable characters, Kiss the Joy As It Flies promises to be a remarkable debut and a reader’s favorite. Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental to-do list and sets about putting her messy life in order. Among other things (hide the vibrator!), she’s determined to finally uncover the identity of her secret admirer; reconnect with long-lost friend and rival Teeny Gaudet; and, most importantly, get her hands on the note her father left before committing suicide all those years ago. But tidying up the edges of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to-do’s. Between fits of weeping and laughter, ranting and bliss, Mercy must contemplate the meaning of life in the face of her own death. In a week filled with the riot of an entire life, nothing turns out the way she’d expected.
A 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.
Surviving the Halifax Explosion is one thing, but how do Lucy Caines and her wayward husband, Harry, a couple who lose everything to the event’s horrors, make peace with their grief? Rebuilding on the rustic shores of Halifax’s Northwest Arm, steps from where the shaft of the Mont Blanc‘s anchor lands that fateful day in 1917. But coping with the disappearance on that day of their infant daughter, they descend into an isolating denial: Lucy through guilt and reticence, and Harry through drinking and gambling. Despite the birth of a treasured son, each faces a future clouded by fear and apprehension. Then, fifty-two years after the catastrophe, Harry suffers a stroke. Lucy confronts the miracle of their survival and their debilitating loss, re-examining the past and her role in its making, and struggling to become the author of her own happiness.
Captive to a staggering genius and mounting paranoia, Mademoiselle—the fictional incarnation of legendary French sculptor Camille Claudel—relives her art-making in Belle Époque Paris from the asylum where she’s been captive for thirty years. The year is 1943, the height of the Vichy regime in war-torn France, and salvation comes in the form of Solange Poitier, the nurse who cares for Mademoiselle in her final days, and their growing friendship. In this compassionate, deftly-researched novel melding art history and storytelling, art and medicine mingle in the characters’ rejection of the misogynistic conditions that would stifle their deepest ambitions and gifts. Best known as Rodin’s muse and mistress, Claudel is given a voice here that’s fiercely hers and her art a recognition long due.
Uprooted, longing for love and to feel somehow situated, Willa Jackson flees life as a military wife when she meets Hugh, the lighthouse keeper on McNabs Island in Halifax Harbour. The object of her fantasies, a musician, he’s the last of a dying breed in this story set during the final days of lightkeeping before automation. Romanced by this magical location—so close to the city and its lively communities, yet so remote—she involves her ten-year-old son, Alex, in her escape. Things sour when isolation and Hugh, harbourer of secrets deadlier than she can imagine, turn as brutal as the forces of nature—and of self-deception—that threaten to engulf all three. A tender yet heartbreaking story of one woman’s reckoning.
Vintage Margaret Atwood meets Patricia Highsmith in this slyly seductive debut set on an eerily beautiful farm teeming with secrets.
The drought has discontented the bees. Soil dries into sand; honeycomb stiffens into wax. But Cynthia knows how to breathe life back into her farm: offer it as an artists’ colony with free room, board, and “life experience” in exchange for backbreaking labour. Silvia, a wide-eyed graduate and would-be poet, and Ibrahim, a painter distracted by constant inspiration, are drawn to Cynthia’s offer, and soon, to each other.
But something lies beneath the surface. The edenic farm is plagued by events that strike Silvia as ominous: taps run red, scalps itch with lice, frogs swarm the pond. One by one, the other residents leave. As summer tenses into autumn, Cynthia’s shadowed past is revealed and Silvia becomes increasingly paralyzed by doubt. Building to a shocking conclusion, The Honey Farm announces the arrival of a bold new voice and offers a thrilling portrait of creation and possession in the natural world.
A 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.”
On an October night in 1899 the body of a well-regarded city councilman is found floating under a Halifax wharf. Chief Inspector Culligan Baxter embarks on an investigation that leads from the waterfront, through the city’s streets, and out into the surrounding countryside. Aided by the young but surprisingly astute Kenny Squire and an odd assortment of barkeeps, petty thieves, and prostitutes, Baxter’s sleuthing takes him into the station’s back files and along a path of connections and corruption, linking some of the city’s most prominent businessmen. From the well-to-do parlours to the seedy taverns to the public spaces that still dominate the city’s downtown today, author David Hood has created a vivid portrait of late-Victorian Halifax. With pointed observations on human behaviour and on the changing character of his hometown, Detective Baxter conducts a sardonic inquiry into morality, justice, and the space in between.