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The Sweetness in the Lime
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95A bittersweet story following fiftysomething Eli Cooper that takes readers from Havana, to Halifax, to Miami, and back again, The Sweetness in the Lime is a charming, clever novel that peels back the rind to discover there really is sweetness in the lime of life.
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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-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.
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Keeping Things Whole
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95It’s 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony is the child of a demanding single mother and an absconding Vietnam War resister who got too used to leaving home, country, and family. With a keen eye on the hybrid Windsor-Detroit landscape, backhanded affection for his hometown, and a growing understanding of his own family’s place in its bootleg history, Antony makes his living as a house painter by day before catapulting loads of Canadian weed across the river to Detroit by night.
Then he meets Kate Chan, a beautiful, street-smart law student, who calls his bluff and picks apart his personal mythology. Ultimately she presents him with his own hard choice and forces him to realize he’s been smuggling much more than he knows. Keeping Things Whole recounts the arc of their relationship and is cut with Antony’s entertaining manifestoes on marijuana, legality, art, theatre, sex, money, and lineage.
With this, his second novel, Darryl Whetter gives us a maddeningly cocky but introspective hero, and his frank, nuanced portrait of a border city and its underground history.
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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.
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You Could Believe in Nothing
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Jamie Fitzpatrick’s debut novel tells of a muddled adulthood in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Derek is forty-one years old. His girlfriend has just left him for a job in Ottawa, his father, a DJ at the local classic rock station, is about to go to court, and his rec hockey team is up in arms about a TV reporter’s attempts to glorify their weekly games. When Derek’s half-brother, Curtis, comes home, the visit stirs up nagging questions about their parents’ early days, and Derek examines again what it means to make commitments that may or may not bring real happiness.
Fitzpatrick captures the subtleties of casual conversation and the often understated wit that emerges between old friends. Having grown up after the decline of whatever might have been the real Newfoundland, Derek and his teammates are generally at a loss to defend the urban, mostly wayward lives the occupy. Set into a wet spring in St. John’s, its rinks, streets, and landmarks, and the sunken map of old haunts and years gone by, You Could Believe in Nothing is a study in familiarity and self-definition, underlining how little we sometimes know about ourselves and the people we know best.
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Nymph and the Lamp
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95A Nova Scotia classic, The Nymph and the Lamp is the story of Isabel Jardin, a strong and sensitive woman, and the men in her life—the stoic Matthew Carney, a living legend, the passionate Gregory Skane, and the innocent but infatuated Jim Sargent. Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of Marina, a wind-swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia, as the characters come to terms with their personal contradictions and the demands of isolated island life.
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Till Death Do Us Part- A Screenplay
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$18.95Marie MacDonald dutifully followed her husband to Washington from small town Maine. It was a move that should have transformed her young Congressman husband, but instead it was Marie who was transformed.
Forced to return Maine after her husband’s brain aneurysm, something had indeed changed, and it wasn’t Maine. Keeping up appearances can sometimes last forever. Just not in this case. -
Crossings: A Thomas Pichon Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Thomas Pichon seems forever at a crossroads, often choosing the path of least resistance, or at least the one most tempting. In this, the third Thomas Pichon novel, his life remains more complicated than he wishes. He encounters highwaymen on a country road, succumbs to a tempting tryst in the spa town of Bath, squanders a new love back in London and begins to long for the higher social station he once enjoyed.
Returning to Paris, his working life initially stalls, but a new lover offers help. He is given the best position he has ever had, one that requires him to go overseas. The crossing is a voyage neither he nor anyone else aboard will forget.
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The Maze A Thomas Pichon Novel
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Like the streets of his 18th-century Paris home, Thomas Pichon’s life is full of twists and turns. Despite winning his wife’s forgiveness for an extramarital affair, Thomas and his lover, Hélène, are caught a second time, and decide that it’s time for new beginnings – in London. As a writer, Thomas tries to make literary sense of the chaos of the life and language of a city teeming with excitement and danger. Hélène finds her own way out of the maze.
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A Possible Madness
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Like many smallish and inelegant towns that dot the coastlines and crossroads of this country, Shean’s postwar, post-industrial economy is in desperate disrepair, and the lengths that some civic leaders will go to in order to do “what’s best” for a town like Shean sometimes requires a leap of faith that has unintended consequences. When a global corporation plans a daring scheme to exploit the remaining coal from an improbable source – and thus to secure Shean’s economic future – politicians try to marginalize the few voices of dissent. Some voices, however, are not easily silenced.
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Thomas: A Secret Life
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Set in early-18th-century France, Thomas: A Secret Life is the imagined life of Thomas Pichon. We first meet Thomas as a twelve-year old in the small town of Vire, Normandy. Precociously sensuous by nature, Thomas is inclined to poetry and religious/erotic imaginings. A series of adolescent adventures provide striking background to his character. Rejecting parental insistence that he become a priest, Thomas steals away to Paris in the middle of the night. There, nearly broke, Thomas works as a lowly office clerk, joins the ranks of aspiring French writers and makes extra money serving as a part-time spy for the police of Paris. But his careers advance too slowly for his liking, and he finds himself taking regular comfort and release in prostitutes’ stalls. A rendezvous with a high-class courtesan brings a new possibility and Thomas plots a future in which he can have his cake and eat it too. Writer, lover, spy: Life is nowhere near as good or as easy as Thomas Pichon imagined it would be.
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Basement Suite
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Eddy and Liz participate in a relationship study for extra cash and learn that they don’t share the same opinions about fidelity, sex, career or truth. In fact, they don’t understand each other. Eddy tries. Liz tires. Basement Suite is a sexy, cheeky look at another side of love.
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Woman From Away
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95Born in 1910 Montana, Tessie Gillis in the 1950s came with her husband Joe to Rear Glencoe in Inverness County to live the hard,satisfying life of rural Cape Breton. Illness finally gave her the opportunity to write, and her friend and editor Evelyn Garbary helped her bloom into one of Cape Breton’s finest writers.
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Down North
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$12.95A terrific and moving read!
These voices confirm the tenderness, good humor and rich story telling of Cape Breton Island. Down North stands as a solid tested play–whether on stage or among friends. And then, it encourages you to “Make this play your own!”–a unique and compelling invitation.
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Acadian Tales from Cape Breton
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95An esteemed Canadian folklorist, Father Anselme Chiasson’s award-winning books include songs, tales and history of the Acadians of Cape Breton and the Magdalen Islands.
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The Midnight Murder
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95In his short, vigorous life, McKinnon was the courageous editor of three Cape Breton newspapers, and a successful novelist. He fearlessly found a voice in the Boston literary world. Then he became a Methodist minister and tried to burn his “evil” novels. He died at 33-after a life as romantic and passionate as any of his characters.
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John R and Son
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95No one has ever written about Cape Breton quite like this! A rich daring short novel, plus 5 stories. A troubling, brutal, and compassionate book that is a riveting classic.
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Stories From the Woman From Away
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95A novel of a woman’s rural life, and of the people whose weaknesses and wit enrich her Cape Breton community.
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The Seven-Headed Beast and Other Acadian Tales from Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$12.95This is the first book of Acadian tales now told in English, and establishes these stories as a part of Cape Breton heritage.
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Moonlight Skater 9 Cape Breton Stories and The Dream
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95A mischievous blend of Scottish and Acadian, these stories blossom, or explode softly, in your life.
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Ashes of My Dreams
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Pregnant, abandoned by her lover, and cut off from her family, free-spirited and independent Gracie is determined to keep her baby and to raise him on her own.
Protecting Elijah Blue from the nuns eager to adopt him out to a “better” home is only Gracie’s first battle…
It takes a whole community of colourful neighbours and friends—and the dream-wisdom of spirits that protect her—for Gracie to navigate the cruel and impoverishing systems that judge and harass her as a single mom on PEI.
She gets through with pride, grit, and humour—but nothing can protect her from her growing son’s desire to know his father’s identity.
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The Grand Change
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95William Andrews’ first novel examines life in a small PEI communityin the 1940s and 50s as changes, so common in the restof the world, begin to take hold. Using a road as an allegory, heweaves a lyrical tale of simple country people, their strugglesand their joys. The story is told through the eyes of a boy calledJake: he is the witness to life on the Hook Road and the eventsthat change that life forever. The book is in some ways like along poem: the people and the world they inhabit are richlyand meticulously described, and the superb writing takes thereader to a world no one will ever see again.
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Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
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Shape of Things to Come
Editor: Richard LemmPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this new collection, Richard Lemm traces his own journey from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Canada with his first foray into the world of short fiction. His hard-living characters follow their own paths through relationships with parents and siblings, friends and lovers, discovering and sometimes crossing their limits as they try to find their own way in the world. A thirty-something man takes a chance on finding love after he encounters an exotic opera singer on an airplane. Two brothers face their own ghosts as they come to terms with the death of their father. A young man tries to live with his friends’ idea of justice after one of them crosses the line. The stories are decidedly masculine – sometimes apologetically so – but always honest. They resonate long after the pages are closed, offering a fresh voice from one of Atlantic Canada’s finest poets.
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A Bountiful Harvest
Editor: Alice Anna ReesePublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Little did organizers know when they planted the seed 15 years ago that the Literary Awards would reap such a bountiful harvest. This collection of over 35 first-prize short stories, poetry, and writing for children represents the best new writing in Prince Edward Island. Readers will recognize several of the names – people who have gone on to be published or produced – including Rai Berzins, Lesley-Anne Bourne, Judy Gaudet, Elaine Hammond, Hugh MacDonald, Brent MacLaine, Steve McOrmond, Dianne Hicks Morrow, Melissa Mullen, Libby Oughton, and Nancy Russell.
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And My Name Is Stories from the Quilt
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this, Margie Carmichael’s first collection of short stories, ordinary women have extraordinary skills, gifts and strengths; they are women who live next door or in the distance, shadowed by fear or absence of recognition. Age, race, and culture connect in the timeless fabric of the quilt, with craft, patience, and faith connecting the women through the threads of their diversity.Anna tells of life after residential school; Irini reflects on her life in war-torn Afghanistan. In Tansie, two adults survive childhood abandonment. Freelance cosmetician to the dead Flora Hill offers insight into the lighter side of love, marriage, and death.Featuring illustrations by Dale McNevin, the book is a collaboration that began with an original painting and companion poem first published in the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health 2000 Calendar.
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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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Roger Sudden An Historical Novel of Conflict, Adventure, and Passion
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Roger Sudden, first published in 1944, is a stirring historical novel set in Nova Scotia during the English/French rivalry over the possession of North America. Roger Sudden, a ruthless trader with both the English and the French, becomes embroiled in the bitter conflict between Halifax and Louisbourg for control of the northern continent.
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Black Snow
$19.95Black Snow is a love story set during the Halifax Explosion. The 1917 disaster was the largest man-made blast the world had ever known, and it cut Halifax off from the rest of the world for the darkest thirty-six hours in its history. Rich in fact and shocking images, the story sets a blistering pace following one man’s search through a ruined city for the love of his life as he confronts the wreckage of his past.