-
Lunenburg (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Annie Welles is an officer with the Halifax Regional Police’s Robbery and Violent Crimes Unit. Recently divorced without custody of her two young sons, Annie’s career, too, is now stalling under the ambitions of her ruthless colleagues. When two murders occur within forty-eight hours of each other, she takes a risk to follow her intuition, hoping to prove herself.
John Taggart is a Scottish journalist looking to land the scoop that will secure his future. In Halifax to cover the Royal visit and a high-profile RCMP coup in a small coastal town, John has a chance to understand his mother’s connection to the province, which she has always kept hidden.
As both become wrapped up in the double homicide, they’re led to the small, picturesque town of Lunenburg and a thirty-year-old murder case with a long-buried secret. The town’s dark past holds the answers they both need, but uncovering it could prove more danger than it’s worth.
-
The Spoon Stealer
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$26.95The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women’s friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.
-
Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$24.95From 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 Limited$24.95The 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.”
-
Throw Down Your Shadows
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Sixteen-year-old Winnie is a creature of habit, a lover of ritual and stability. If she had her way, not much would change. But when a new family moves to town, Winnie and her three best friends—all boys—find themselves changing quickly and dramatically to impress Caleb, their strange and charismatic new companion. Under Caleb’s influence, Winnie and her friends test boundaries, flirt with danger, and in the end, illuminate darkness within each other and themselves.
Following a before and after structure that pivots around a mysterious and devastating fire at a local winery, Throw Down Your Shadows is a compelling exploration of the contours of young friendship and the development of powerful new appetites.
Reminiscent of The Girls by Emma Cline and Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, this literary coming-of-age story feeds a growing demand in adult fiction for candid portrayals of the young female experience as complex and provocative, and announces a bold new voice in Canadian fiction.
-
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.
-
Marilla Before Anne
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Marilla Cuthbert was fifty-two years old when the plucky red-headed Anne Shirley came to live with her and her brother, Matthew, at Green Gables farm on Prince Edward Island. A seemingly cold and dour spinster, her heart eventually softens to the loveable orphan girl. But for over a century readers have wondered, who was Marilla before Anne?
In Louise Michalos’s remarkable debut novel, readers are introduced to a spirited eighteen-year-old Marilla Cuthbert—a girl not unlike Anne herself—who is desperately in love, and whose whole life is spread before her. But when a moment of defiance brings life-changing consequences, a new Marilla begins to take shape, one who would learn to bear tragedy like a birthright, and loss as an inevitability, and who would hold steadfast to the secrets that could shatter the lives of everyone around her.
Weaving its way from Marilla’s early life in Avonlea to her coming-of-age in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and back, Marilla Before Anne is the story readers of Anne of Green Gables have longed for. Told with a refreshingly original East Coast voice, this exquisite, heartbreaking work of historical fiction takes readers on a journey back in time, to the Green Gables where Marilla Cuthbert lived, loved, and learned, long before Anne.
-
One Who Has Been Here Before
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$22.95I move around the side of the house. There is a thick mass of shrubs on the north-east side. Juniper, and caragana gone wild. Without thinking, I pluck a flower and put it into my mouth, savouring the delicate yellowness of its flavour. Now when did I learn to do that? Who first put a caragana blossom on my tongue?
Emma G. Weaver easily loses herself in history. She’s much more comfortable imagining the lives of the dead than getting involved with the living. She pushes down nagging questions about her own history, but when her Master’s research leads her from her safe and comfortable life in Edmonton, Alberta, back to the south shore of Nova Scotia, those questions can’t help but bubble to the surface. And Emma soon finds that the lives of the dead are inextricably linked to the lives of the living, that secrets don’t stay hidden forever—and that everything changes when they come to light.
Inspired by the true story of the notorious Goler clan of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, this work of contemporary Atlantic gothic fiction troubles the boundaries between myth and truth, villains and victims.
-
In the Wake
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Set on the shores of modern-day Nova Scotia, two women are stagnated by grief and their own flawed versions of the past. Can the truth set them free?
When Emily and her family move back to Nova Scotia from Calgary, it is a return to the coastal landscape that already haunts her—and the waters where her father died. She meets her neighbour Linda, a gruff but loving widow and Linda’s grown son, Tom, who struggles to stay on an even keel. As they settle in, Emily and her husband, Daniel, learn more about the short but turbulent history of the house they’ve just bought. With Daniel away for work, Emily becomes caught up in the lives of her neighbours, relying on Linda’s friendship and growing closer to Tom, despite his unsettling knack for appearing when she least expects him. As the tension in each family builds, both Emily and Linda must confront long-unanswered questions.
With its nuanced depictions of marriage, parenting, grief and mental illness, and humorous, understated dialogue, Davison’s debut is at once suspenseful and subtle.
