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Acadia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95” a rollicking read about the escapades of those larger-than-life characters who dominated the early days of European thirst for dominance in the New World…” Atlantic Books Today Acadia is based on the true story of the blood feud that founded the French colony and the two very different married couples at the centre of it.
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Remembering Summer
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95A novel of love and hate, peace and war. The setting is Newfoundland in the late 1960s. It is a time of great upheaval in mind and spirit. A challenging and powerful novel.
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One Who Has Been Here Before
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$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.
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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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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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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. -
Spoonhandle
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95Spoonhandle, Ruth Moore’s second novel, spent 14 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List and was made into the movie Deep Waters. Spoonhandle is about Maine, brilliantly authentic, but the story told is universal, as old as time as it deals with the struggle between love and meanness of spirit, between human dignity and greed.
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The Weir
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95Ruth Moore’s classic tale of Maine islanders who feud, gossip and struggle while being battered by the relentless tides of change sweeping over their community and their entire way of life.
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Blue Summer
Publisher: Islandport Press$20.95A riveting coming-of-age novel told in retrospect by a washed-out taxi-driving musician from Baxter, Maine, who must come to terms with his past by returning to Maine and confronting the secrets and violence in his family.
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Random Act
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95A senseless murder seems like a random act of violence, until it doesn’t.
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Mapping Murder
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Danger has found museum director Julie Williamson once again when an annual convention of historical society directors puts her in the path of a troubled colleague. Precious artifacts are missing and landing in the hands of unscrupulous dealers to the south. Williamson immediately senses foul play. When the colleague mysteriously winds up dead, and more thefts occur, Ryland’s favourite puzzle-solving amateur detective can’t resist setting a trap. In his third Julie Williamson mystery, Andrews brings back a beloved cast of characters to help Williamson chase down the confounding clues. This case of historical whodunit, set against a backdrop of rolling hills and picturesque towns of Western Maine, is sure to keep you up reading all night.
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Home Body
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95There ain’t no rest for the wicked… In Home Body, the eighth Jack McMorrow Mystery, Jack has reformed his bad boy ways and settled into seeming domestic tranquility. But the quiet life is short-lived when Jack rescues a homeless teen from a brutal gang beating. This gesture rewards him with yet another descent into violence, murder, and the dark underworld of at-risk kids living on the street. As Jack prepares for the birth of his child, his efforts to save somebody else’s child fail, and he must track down a stalker. Who is the predator and who is the prey in a world where no one can be trusted? It’s a high stakes game of hide-and-seek–one that Jack can’t afford to lose.
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Straw Man
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Author Gerry Boyle takes his readers into territory all-too familiar from the daily headlines: illegal gun sales, culture clashes between old and new, cyberbullying, and the random violence that poses a threat to even the closest of communities.
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Pink Chimneys
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Nineteenth-century Bangor, known as the Queen City, is a city of sharp contrasts–from the elegant mansions of Broadway, built from lumber fortunes and bootlegged alcohol money to the poverty-stricken Joppa neighbourhood lined with taverns and frequented by desperate men and “fallen women.” To survive, Maude, a headstrong midwife, Fanny, the rags-to-riches housemistress of the infamous Pink Chimneys brothel, and Elizabeth, an orphaned, demure seamstress, must form unlikely alliances and discover the strength to overcome the odds in a culture that tries–and fails–to limit their potential.
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Huntin’ and Fishin’ with the Ole Man
Artist: John HulubPublisher: Islandport Press$16.95The Ole Man and company love to hunt and fish, but in the process they find themselves in plenty of pickles that require ingenuity, humor, outdoor know-how, and a lot of patience to endure. Hilarious tall tales that will become a staple at a camp or in the canoe, and will come in handy when the snows come or the fish won’t bite.
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Borderline
Publisher: Islandport Press$16.95In Gerry Boyle’s 5th Jack McMorrow novel, journalist McMorrow travels to the sleepy town of Scanesett, Maine. When a man known as P. Ray Mantis has disappeared from a tour bus, no one in town seems to care. Except Jack McMorrow, who knows there’s a story too good to pass up.
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The Havener Sisters
Publisher: Islandport Press$16.95The third book in Ardeana Hamlin’s Pink Chimneys series, The Havener Sisters follows the fortunes of the Havener triplets in nineteenth century Maine as they experience what happens when it becomes necessary to embrace change later in life. Hamlin returns to the setting and characters that have made her Pink Chimneys series a favorite of thousands of readers in this well-researched and engaging novel.
The Havener Sisters follows Abbott’s Reach as the third book in Ardeana Hamlin’s beloved Pink Chimneys series. The story After eight years of life as land-lubbers, the sisters are suddenly faced with a crisis in economic circumstances that propels them into new adventures—some welcome, some not. Her latest effort will transport the reader back in time at the dawn of suffrage and the Industrial age in the Northeast.
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Once Burned
Publisher: Islandport Press$26.95There’s something smoldering in the drop-dead pretty town of Sanctuary and veteran crime reporter Jack McMorrow is back to sniff it out. In this long-awaited tenth installment of the wildly popular McMorrow mystery series, best-selling author Gerry Boyle crafts a smoking-hot story that will keep you riveted until the very last page.
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Closer All the Time
Publisher: Islandport Press$24.95The residents of small-town Baxter are going nowhere fast—but not for lack of trying. In this deftly written novel, veteran author Jim Nichols strings together the bittersweet stories of several different characters bound together by shared geography and the insular nature of small-town life. With the Atlantic coastal waters as a backdrop, Nichols artfully explores the nature of connection—hoped for, missed, lost, and found—in Closer All the Time; that very special novel that delivers quick-moving, compelling storytelling with a lasting emotional wallop.
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The Contest
Publisher: Islandport Press$25.95When the Samuel Tippett Fly Fishers club devises a fishing contest to determine the world’s best trout fly, they have no idea that the pursuit of perfection will soon overtake reason. During their quest, the ten participants fight over rules and cease caring about the feelings of their fellow members. This is a tale of how camaraderie among anglers can be tested while arguing the merits of one’s “piscatorial philosophy,” and ultimately, about finding a balance between chasing an ideal and reveling in life’s most important moments.
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Strangers on the Beach
Publisher: Islandport Press$24.95Billionaire Ferdinand Sevigny is brave, bold, and brash. But his latest stunt –to sail blinded, single handed, across the Atlantic –goes horribly awry, depositing him onto the summer tourist town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. His sudden arrival trigger a eerie of sinister events that even he cannot forestall: a naked woman washes up on a beach; a confused teen-aged boy stumbles upon a crime; a naïve policeman struggles with a deadly conflict of interest. Now Sevigny, and all those lives he touches, must make decisions that will define them forever.
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Abbott’s Reach
Publisher: Islandport Press$18.95Ardeana Hamlin grew up in Bingham, Maine, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the days of the river drives, the veneer mill, and the woods operations. Now a newspaper journalist, she lives in Hampden, Maine, and is the author of two previous novels, Pink Chimneys and A Dream of Paris.
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Windswept
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95The third of Mary Ellen Chase’s Maine novels (following “Mary Peters” and “Silas Crockett”), “Windswept” is the romantic and tumultuous saga of a Maine family who makes its home Down East. Spanning six decades, starting in the late nineteenth century, the novel depicts their lives as they meet head on the joys and challenges of the changing and encroaching world and eventually, World War II. Through it all, their home provides the family with a safe haven in which to sink their roots as they strive to nurture their humanity and spirituality, all the while surrounded by the natural beauty of the Maine coast. “Windswept” was a national best-seller and the biggest seller of Chase’s career.
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Stealing History
Publisher: Islandport Press$15.95Just a few days into her new job as director of a busy historical society and museum nestled in the mountains of quaint Ryland, Maine, flatlander Julie Williamson discovers all is not as it should be. Her dream job is more of a nightmare. She expected to find an eccentric board of trustees, a cool reception from the assistant director who had wanted her job, and a necessary adjustment to small-town life, but she didn’t expect that some of the museum’s most valuable artifacts, including a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Hannibal Hamlin, would quickly turn up missing. And when a murder hits especially close to home for Julie, she becomes embroiled in an ever-widening and complex mystery. “Stealing History” is sure to enthrall readers who love to curl up with a good mystery, especially one that weaves details of small-town life, delightful characters and history into a suspenseful tale that keeps them guessing up until the last page.
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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.
