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Tapestry of Green A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carl Cocking had two worthy ambitions: to restore his father’s battered reputation and bring his mother and brothers to some agreement whereby they could call themselves a family. Tapestry of Green is the story of one Englishman who traces the last months of his father’s life through the dark streets of Victorian London to the sampans and opium dens of China. During a quest that he cannot abandon, Carl witnesses the brutality of British trading ships, the Great Trek by the Dutch in South Africa and the beginning of the Opium Wars.
The story takes place in England and China between 1837 and 1843, in the era when hot air and gas balloons were creating great interest in aviation. Artist and inventor Robert Cocking often took his young son Carl on balloon excursions over the English countryside and the city of London where they could look down on a world filled with great filth and great beauty. Carl escapes the unravelling of his family and only returns to London when his father makes aviation history by becoming the first Englishman killed in a parachute accident.
“He is the greatest fool in England, they wrote in their horrid penny papers, and I would not let my father be so remembered.”
Carl tries to reconstruct the last months of his father’s life. His investigation takes him through London’s gentlemen clubs and shabby tenements and on a voyage to the other side of the world to the one man who helped his father design his unique parachute. Carl arrives in China just as the Chinese are rebelling over British intrusions and the supplying of opium to the masses of Chinese.
“On the second day on the Canton River thousands of dead fish floated by, killed by white powder seeping into the water from smashed wooden chests.”
Although Carl is fictional, his father Robert and the Opium Wars are very real.
Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster who, for many years, was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. He is the author of seven books, three of which have been transformed into stage plays. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours is being developed into a television series. His last book, Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was published in 2013, and is now being prepared for the stage. Bruce lives in his hometown of Parrsboro with his wife Helen.
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Blue Tattoo A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters – from Boston mayor James Michael Curley to Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer – The Blue Tattoo tells the sweeping story of the lives caught up in the unbelievable devastation of the Halifax Explosion.
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Down the Coaltown Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.
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Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Duddy McGill is a dreamer –a man who turns his back on reality so often he falls from one disaster into the next. Occasionally, he is given an opportunity, so when no one wants the job, Duddy is appointed the town’s temporary police chief. It’s only for a week but in the first day of the job, Duddy arrests Mrs. Truman Taylor for shoplifting. A prominent citizen, Mrs. Taylor is humiliated and horrified. She resists and ensuing struggle, a dance down Main Street to the jail, happens in front for the astonished townspeople. Unfortunately for Duddy, he has arrested the wrong woman.
He doesn’t have much better luck with Jugs Henderson, who sues him when she falls off her clothesline platform into the petunia patch, or with Mrs. Gordon McKenzie, a widowed schoolteacher who he ends up propositioning. Then there is Mary Lou Weaver, recently moved to Parrsboro because she always wanted to live by the sea. She definitely ends up looking at the water –stuck high above the ground in Duddy’s truck. No wonder Duddy has a few prospects and a very suspicious wife.
Finally, Duddy’s long-suffering wife Minnie has had enough. Out goes her husband and her old life. Yet despite it all, Duddy McGill tries to help people. He is the go-between for the man from Michigan, who has big plans to build a croquet factory in the town, and the local woman he has been searching for. Duddy really wants to do right. He assists his friends when possible. He builds a new deck for Royal after his friend suffers another tragedy and when Mink Martin goes to war with the bureaucracy, Duddy is there to help.
Duddy McGill is a man worthy of salvation. The problem is, he’ll have to do it himself. But fate has a way of intervening, of picking up a small-town guy and making him an international hero. Here is a story of love, absurdity and people with warm hearts. Few writers could make a funeral funny, but it happens here in this story of human folly where you’ll never stop laughing.
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Runaway Horses
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the middle of the nineteenth century, a dozen young NovaScotian wild riders were an essential link between the capitalsof the Old World and the New. A news syndicate called theAssociated Press made a deal with Cunard Steamship Linesthat the Royal Mail Ships would carry a news packet to betelegraphed to New York City. A steam launch would speed thepacket across the Bay of Fundy to the nearest telegraph station,at Saint John, New Brunwick. But, despite the modern miraclesof steam power and electromagnetism, the fastest way to carrythe news packet from the Halifax docks to the Fundy shorewould still be relays of galloping horses. The Halifax Expressneeded riders who were light in the saddle yet long-limbed andstrong enough to handle the monster thoroughbreds of the day.Seana McCann is a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant whosefather’s been killed in a far-off war and whose mother sees anescape from potato-grubbing poverty by marrying a wealthyfarmer. It seems clear to Seana that the old farmer’s notjust interested in getting a ready-made family, but in havinga teenage stepdaughter who belongs to him until she turnstwenty-one. But her mother won’t listen to her and intends togo ahead with the marriage. Seana sees no way out, nowhere to run.In another part of the province, a teenage orphan feels that one of the orphanage school priests is taking anunhealthy interest. It seems like a trap with no escape. Then word goes out that a new enterprise called TheHalifax Express is looking for lithe and limber young riders who are good with horses and willing to galloppunishing distances. It seems like an operation that won’t ask too many questions, so long as you can do the job.Maybe a youthful runaway could disappear into the Halifax Express and squirrel away enough wages to have afuture. Maybe even a gawky girl too tall for her age could shear her hair off and pretend to be a boy.Like all of Alfred Silver’s historical novels, Runaway Horsessticks within the historical record and incorporates documentedevents. This story might well have happened exactly as it’s told.A
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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.
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Brighten the Corner Where You Are A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95In this bittersweet novel inspired by the life of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, master storyteller Carol Bruneau gives voice to the artist, allowing her to speak from beyond the grave, freed from the stigmas of gender, poverty and disability that marked her life and shaped her art.
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A Forest for Calum
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The story is Roddie’s. The stage is his guardian and grandfather Calum’s. A quiet and stoic man, Calum Gillies and his aging friends illuminate for us the changing world around them: the loss of the coal mines, the labour strife and lean years endured, the religious parochialism that divides families and communities and, most important, a disappearing language. The setting is Cape Breton; the themes of cultural and rural change and decline are universal.
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Good Mothers Don’t
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95It’s 1960 and Elizabeth is slowly coming apart. Her reality is splintering and she wants to harm her children. Fifteen years later, Elizabeth is desperately trying to fill in the gaps electric shock therapy has left in her memory. She longs to find her children and explain that she never meant to leave for so long. A moving exploration of illness, memory, and how we fight for who we love.
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A Dark House & Other Stories
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Snap decisions, risky alliances and comical wrong-headedness bring the stories in award-winning author Ian Colford’s latest collection to life. Colford weaves wit and nuance into portrayals of characters facing questions of fortune, fate and self-preservation. Awkward and dangerous situations arise as Colford, dryly yet empathetically, illustrates what happens when people do what they think is best for all.
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Berth
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Uprooted, 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.
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Making it Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Tinker Gordon doesn’t want anything to change. He thinks that if he holds on tightly enough, his family, his tiny Cape Breton Island community, his very world will stay exactly the way it has always been. But explosions large and small—a world away, in the Middle East, in the land of opportunity in western Canada, and in his own home in Falkirk Cove—threaten to turn everything Tinker has ever known upside down.
Set variously in the heart of rural Cape Breton, on the war-torn streets of Aleppo and in a Turkish refugee camp, in the new wild west frontier of the Alberta oil patch, and in a tiny apartment in downtown Toronto, Tinker’s family, friends, and neighbours new and old must find a way to make it home.
In her adult fiction debut, Alison DeLory ponders a question as relevant in Atlantic Canada as anywhere in the world: where and how do we belong, and what does it take to make it home?
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A Soldier’s Place
$19.95For two decades following the First World War, Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity—until now.
Carefully curated by author and editor Thomas Hodd, A Soldier’s Place is an anthology of fifteen of Bird’s best combat stories, based on the experiences of himself and of others, covering all aspects of the war effort and following brave Canadian, American, and Australian soldiers.
An infantry soldier, Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and became one of the most prolific Canadian authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works.
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Charting the Darkness
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95American-born fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran, Nick Sullivan, is a broken man. Abandoned for dead by his family while he rotted in a Viet Cong prison camp, Sullivan finds solace in alcohol and flashbacks to war and prison.
The death of a nearly forgotten uncle takes Sullivan to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he had spent many adolescent summers with his family and all that such a privilege entailed – beaches, fishing and first loves. His uncle’s bequest takes Nick by surprise and, in the process of refurbishing a salvaged sailboat, he too is salvaged.
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Immortal Air
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Bright and promising as a student, George Cameron was sent to live with his sister in Boston while he attended a prestigious Latin school and later the Boston School of Law. It was what his mother wanted for him and his brother, Charley. It was what any well-bred family would want for an intelligent son destined for greater things than his humble New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, upbringing. On his journey to find his voice among the great poets of the 19th century, George had to leave behind his first love, a muse who haunted his thoughts and fuelled his passion for poetry throughout his life.
Law clerk, journalist, poet, George’s life often seemed to fall short of the dreams of fame he secreted in his private journals, yet his poetry remained ever-present in a mind churning with words and feeling.
George Cameron teamed up with Oscar Telgmann to write the longest-running Canadian opera. Leo: The Royal Cadet. It was his steadfast brother Charley who shared George’s work in the posthumous publication of Lyrics on Freedom, Love and Death.
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Tinker and Blue A Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95At age 19 and 20, respectively, Tinker Dempsey and his oldest friend Blue figured it was time they followed generations of Cape Bretoners and crossed the Canso Causeway, if for no other reason than to find a few stories they could call their own when their wandering ways brought them back home. It had been Blue’s idea to drive their fourth-hand 1957 push-button Plymouth out to San Francisco to look at those Haight-Ashbury types.
Hitch-hiking hippies and homespun humour and wisdom, love troubles and trouble with the law – Tinker and Blue’s California adventures are a funny and poignant flashback.
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The Innocent And Other Stories
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95Including Sheldon Currie’s guide and thoughtful introduction, The Innocent and Other Writings is another in a series of Breton Books by and about Legendary Cape Bretoners. Tessie Gillis ranks as the Godmother of Cape Breton Fiction–the first woman to dare write about the darker side of rural Cape Breton and the challenges and strategies for surviving and creating a compassionate and enduring community. Tenderness and insight are fundamental threads through all her writings.
This new collection is an essential sampler of Tessie Gillis’s writing, including “The Innocentt”, “The Day the Men Went to Town,” a beautiful portion of “The Last Chapter But One,” and much more. These are lasting stories for today.
