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The Walking Bathroom
Artist: Erin Bennett BanksPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95It’s Halloween and Amayah doesn’t have a costume to wear to school. She dressed as a ghost for the last three years in a row, witches are overdone, and fairies are not her style. She wants to be something different, something creative, something no one else in the world has ever been in the history of Halloween.
A sweet story of standing out and fitting in, The Walking Bathroom is the newest book from award-winning author and spoken-word poet Shauntay Grant (Up Home). With fun, vibrant artwork from Erin Bennett Banks (Change of Heart), this imaginative tale is bound to inspire some unique costumes and become a Halloween favourite!
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A Bird on Every Tree
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Carol Bruneau, author of six acclaimed works of fiction (most recently, These Good Hands), brings her finely honed voice to 12 new stories about shifting concepts of Nova Scotian identity.
In “The Race,” a war bride’s remarkable life trajectory unfolds as she competes in an international swim marathon in the Northwest Arm. Strain erupts between a Haligonian couple in “Burning Times,” while they struggle to keep track of one another, both physically and emotionally, on an Italian vacation. In “Polio Beach,” cousins gather oceanside over the will of a recently deceased aunt who once saved one of them from drowning.
Writing with empathy, humour, and linguistic precision, Bruneau follows characters who find themselves connected to Nova Scotia by birth, through attempts at escape and new beginnings, or as a temporary resting place, always carrying with them their own idiosyncratic and complex definitions of “home.”
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Disposable Souls
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95The 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.
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The Fundy Vault A Rosalind Mystery
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Linda Moore’s longawaited sequel to Foul Deeds is another highly engaging mix of art and environmental justice. Finally working a real job as a researcher for the Public Prosecution Service, Roz is on her first paid vacation. She has rented a cottage on Nova Scotia’s beautiful Minas Basin with plans to explore ideas for her next theatre production. Accompanied by her cat and a stack of Beckett plays, she has no sooner settled in than she spots what looks like a woman’s body tangled in the roots of a floating tree. Before the local RCMP can send a boat out, the body is retrieved by helicopter, and Roz watches it disappear over North Mountain. It’s time to call in her old sleuthing partner, McBride.
When McBride completely disappears, Roz and her longtime theatre friend Sophie roam the backroads and small towns of the Annapolis Valley in search of clues, narrowing in on the out-oftheway quarry no one seems to want them to visit, the tanker trunks that nearly run them off the road, and a young journalist who seems to have come too close to the truth.
The Fundy Vault is a lightning-paced literary mystery that will keep the heart pumping and the brain ticking long after the final page.
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Haunted Girl Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95In 1878 eighteen-year-old Esther Cox arrived in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to live with her sister’s family. Shortly after Esther moved in, the story goes, the house was plagued by unexplained occurrences–something (or someone) knocked on the walls, hid household items, moved furniture around, and set fires. Esther herself was subject to mysterious fevers, prodding and, on one occasion, stabbing. These occurrences followed her when she went to stay with other families in the area. Eventually she was charged with robbery and spent a month in jail, after which the haunting ceased.
Was Esther the victim of paranormal powers or the troubled mind behind a series of elaborate hoaxes? At the time of her alleged haunting, the plausibility of Esther Cox’s claims were hotly debated in newspapers and by fellow Amherst residents. In the hundred years since her death, Esther’s story has been retold numerous times and she remains to this day the town’s most famous historical figure.
Includes 30 photos of key locations in Amherst related to the story as well as Esther’s family members.
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The Lunenburg Werewolf
$15.95The wind is howling and a full moon is in the sky-it must be time for more chilling tales from storyteller Steve Vernon.
Spanning the length and width of Nova Scotia, these 25 blood-chilling yarns make perfect campfire fare. Some stories are so terrifying that they have been told far and wide, such as the Ghosts of Oak Island or The Haunting of Esther Cox. Others, including the Murder Island Massacre and the Caledonia Mills Spook, might be lesser known, but are no less scary. Written in Steve Vernon’s unique style, these stories of the haunted, the supernatural, and the unexplainable are part history, part folklore, and a lot of old-fashioned, frightening fun.
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Big Town A Novel of Africville
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Seventeen-year-old Early Okander lives with his father in a shack, a white family on the outskirts of the Halifax community of Africville. It is the early 1960s, and Early and his young friends, Toby and Chub, start to hear whispers that the city wants to move the residents of Africville out of their homes. As the three try to sort out what relocation might mean for the community, they also struggle to come to terms with their own problems: Early’s abuse at the hands of his father, Toby’s illness, Chub’s family breakdown.
Written from Early’s unique perspetive, Big Town is an unforgettable account of a community in crisis and the remarkable spirit that persists in the face of adversity.
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Shoot Me
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95A 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.”
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Bluenose Ghosts (2nd Edition)
$22.95Ghosts guarding buried treasure, phantom ships, haunted houses and supernatural warnings of death—these are just some of the strange and mysterious phenomena that you will encounter in Bluenose Ghosts. These unexplained mysteries are all the more chilling because they are based on personal experiences of ordinary people, told to Helen Creighton, one of Canada?s most respected and renowned folklorists, over a period of thirty years. So when the moon is full and the wind is howling, be prepared to be spooked by apparitions and things that go bump in the night. Bluenose Ghosts was an instant hit when it was first published in 1957.
This new edition of Bluenose Ghosts features a new foreword from Nova Scotia writer Clary Croft that explores Creighton’s enduring influence on the province’s folklore.
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Maritime UFO Files
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Though UFOs have recently “landed” a significant place in pop culture, they have made their presence known in the Maritimes for decades. In fact, one of the earliest known sightings of a UFO was reported to Judge Simeon Perkins in Nova Scotia in 1796.Beginning with the 1950s, Maritime UFO Files Chronicles, decade-by-decade, dramatic and unusual sightings of a variety of mysterious, multi-shaped UFOs witnessed by pilots, ordinary citizens, and even RCMP officers. These first-hand accounts, based on actually military documents and RCMP reports, range from the observation of unexplainable lights in the sky, to claims of abduction. This book also devotes a chapter to the famous Shag Harbour Incident of 1967 –an event that remains one of the most documented accounts of a UFO crash in modern history.
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Bluenose Magic
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Bluenose Magic, first published in 1968, is considered a classic of Maritime literature, and its author, Dr. Helen Creighton, is one of Canada’s best-loved and most respected folklorists.
This fascinating and engaging companion to the author’s best-selling Bluenose Ghosts welcomes readers into a world of forerunners, enchantment, dreams, divination, buried treasure, guardian ghosts, home remedies, and mystical occurrences. These unique tales have been passed on from generation to generation of Nova Scotia’s families. -
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More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95Are you still afraid of things that go bump in the night? Do you still think someone is watching you even though no one is there? Do doors and windows still open and close on their own? Do you still see people in your home even though you know you are alone? If you answer yes to even one of these questions, then More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia will make you feel not alone.
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Where Evil Dwells
Editor: Vernon OicklePublisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95From the macabre to the fantastical, from the paranormal to superstitions and folklore, from stories of ghosts, monsters and legends, Where Evil Dwells: The Nova Scotia Anthology of Horror has it all. These stories will take you on a wild ride to the extreme limits and beyond the realm of reality. Anyone who loves a good ghost story will want this book. It is a must-have for horror fans!
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Poetic Inquiries of Reflection and Renewal
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$39.95From migration, teaching, attending to the sick and dying, or navigating new relationships or identities, the poems in this collection are at once evocative and poignant and at times playful. This book offers insight into what is possible with the poetic voice.
This book can be read from beginning to end or by reading non-sequentially among the contributions. The editors of this collection have brought together a diverse array of authors who use poetry as research, and who explore many ways in which poetry can bring the reader into deeper understandings of experiences or issues.
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Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95Are you afraid of things that go bump in the night? Do you think someone is watching you even though no one is there? Do doors and windows open and close on their own? If you’ve answered yes to even one of these questions, then join veteran ghost story teller Vernon Oickle as he brings to life some of Nova Scotia’s most intriguing tales of suspense in this collection of ghost stories.
FRIGHTENING
With his new book, master storyteller Vernon Oickle treats us to another volume of frightening stories to keep the chill in our hearts even on the hottest of days. Oickle has been a significant chronicler of the long and rich Nova Scotia heritage of the supernatural and this volume is sure to be an important contribution to that tradition.
— Darryll Walsh, acclaimed ghost hunter and author of Legends and Monsters of Atlantic CanadaKNOWS HIS STUFF
If I want to talk to someone about my health, then I want to talk to my doctor. If I want to talk to someone about the state of my house’s plumbing, then I talk to my plumber. If I want to talk to someone about the ghost stories of Nova Scotia — then I want to talk to Vernon Oickle. The man knows his stuff.
— Steve Vernon, storyteller and author of Haunted Harbours -
My island’s the house I sleep in at night
Publisher: Island Studies Press$18.95“Being an Islander means that you aren’t like everyone else.” Bounded by water, you can live your life with certainty knowing where your edges are. Drawn from interviews with artists from Newfoundland and Tasmania, these poems capture what it means to be an islander. To know every rock and tickle, “the sea your road /the whole in the sky /your light to travel by. In My island’s the house I sleep in at night, Brinklow weaves stories and images with her own poetic imaginings.
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Bird Calls The Island Responds
Publisher: Island Studies Press$14.95In 1854 British travel writer Isabella Lucy Bird visited Prince Edward Island for six weeks and published an account of her stay there that was both scathing and charming. “Paris may be the gayest city in the world,” she wrote, “and London the richest, but Charlottetown was the most gossiping.” “I never saw a community,” she continued,” in which people appear to hate each other so cordially.”
Contemporary Island poet Jane Ledwell was both fascinated and exasperated by Bird’s haughty, privileged judgement and decided to “write back”–160 years later. The result is Bird Calls: The Island Responds.
Bird Calls weaves the travel prose of Isabella Lucy Bird with Ledwell’s poems written in response, and delivers an intriguing conversation for the reader which contrasts PEI then and now, and showcases the talents of two accomplished writers, from very different generations.
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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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Rudan Mi-bheanailteach is an Cothroman/ Intangible Possibilites
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95LEWIS MACKINNON was born in Inverness, Cape Breton, to a Gaelic-speaking father and a French Acadian mother. He was raised in Antigonish County, on the Nova Scotia mainland. Educated in English, throughout his personal, academic and professional activities, Lewis has maintained an interest in his Gaelic roots. He is an accomplished singer as well as poet. His first collection Famhair agus dàin Ghàidhlig eile (Giant and other Gaelic poems) was published in 2008 (CBU Press). Since then he has been invited to numerous literary festivals internationally and, in 2011, was named Bard of the Royal National Mod (Mòd Nàiseanta Rìoghail) in Scotland, the first bard from outwith Scotland.
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Clay Pots and Bones
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95The poetry of Clay Pots and Bones is Lindsay Marshall’s way of telling stories, of speaking with others about what things that matter to him. His heritage. His people. His life as a Mi’kmaw. For the reader, Clay Pots and Bones is a colourful journey from early days, when the People of the Dawn understood, interacted with and roamed the land freely, to the turbulent present and the uncertain future where Marshall envisions a rebirth of the Mi’kmaq. The poetry challenges and enlightens. It will, most certainly, entertain.
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Famhair/Giant
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$15.95No contemporary work from a sole author of Gaelic poetry from the Nova Scotia perspective been published in this province – until now. Cultural identity, sense of place and expression are important elements in the work of any artist. This book of contemporary Nova Scotia Gaelic poetry spans the landscape of Gaelic Cape Breton, the eastern Nova Scotia mainland and indeed the broader collective consciousness of Nova Scotians within the confines of their own province and in the wider, diverse, multi-ethnic, North American reality.
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A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Narrative Obituary Verse and Song in Northern Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95This rare book is about community, caring and pioneer survival. It brings to life Andrew Dunphy— a man who roamed northern Cape Breton, carried the news, nursed his neighbours—and wrote magnificent obituary poems that told their stories, comforted them in disaster, and helped their communities survive. Over one hundred years later, Ronald Caplan captured this story in its final hours. Told with the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy — A Stone for Andrew Dunphy reveals the robust rural life that flourished as the 20th century dawned.
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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.
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Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes
Editor: Michael Taft, Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95These are the folk tales from Dr. Helen Creighton’s life journey through the Maritime Provinces, collecting songs and ghost stories and old cures–and folk tales. Helen serves as our guide, introducing us to storytellers, setting the scene of the telling–and then she lets the person tell the story just as it was told to her.
The feel of the kitchen and the fish shed still cling to these stories. Some are long, really miraculous folk tales–miraculous in detail and in that they have managed to survive. Others are the brief riddle or the tantalizing quick-telling that a folklorist can expect along the way. Helen kept it all. And taken as a whole, the reality and intensity of those rare smaller pieces reveal their value in among the more finished, well-told tales.
Both Helen Creighton and A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes are Atlantic treasures. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Taft and Ronald Caplan, and a Motif Index by Michael Taft.
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Great Cape Breton Storytelling
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95From a lifetime of collecting, Ron Caplan offers tales from the rare complex of Cape Breton Island. From a grim sealing trek to a mother’s courage in a windstorm, to memories of drunken hens, to a shark attack. Mackerel fishermen bag a huge tuna, and an itinerant butcher chases a wild cow. The book includes fables from the island’s Czech, Pakistani, and Lebanese heritage in among stories from the Gaelic, French and Mi’kmaq traditions. Good solid reading in one lasting collection!
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Local Hero 20 New Short Stories from Cape Breton Island
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95This superb collection introduces Carmel Mikol and Hector MacNeil and Sue McKay Miller within a solid blend of noted writers including Carol Bruneau, Clive Doucet and Maureen Hull. From country life to city, on Cape Breton Island and away, here are Tim Vassallo and Leacock Award winner Bill Conall, Teresa O’Brien, Ellison Robertson and the comic genius of Julie Curwin and Larry Gibbons. Victor Sakalauskas and Dave Doucette portray children in harrowing, breathtaking circumstances, and the realism of D.C. Troicuk, Joyce Rankin, Ruth Schneider, David Muise, and Jigs Gardner deliver exquisite stories from life. Poignant, comic, powerful and heart-wrenching, Local Hero is marvelous evidence of Cape Breton’s place inlasting Canadian literature.
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The Blind Man’s Eyes
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95With over 100 of her best poems plus George Elliott Clarke’s essay on the achievement of Rita Joe, The Blind Man’s Eyes confirms Joe’s place in Canadian literature.
From a homeless child who led a blind beggar door-to-door, Rita Joe emerged as spokesperson for her nation and for the individual’s heart. Her much anthologized poems and rare autobiography have riveted her message to the Canadian conscience, revealing both the Mi’kmaq people and the universal artist’s heart of this Elder.
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God’s Country Cape Breton Stories, Classic and Rare
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95Cape Breton Island continues to earn its place at the table of Canadian literature. God’s Country offers an essential collection of classic stories that helped build that award-winning reputation, as well as several rare and harder-to-find stories that maintain the growing respect while pointing toward future literary achievements. This is a lasting book that works for both bedside reading and the high school and university classroom. In God’s Country you’ll find stories by Alistair MacLeod, Joan Clark, Lynn Coady, D.R. MacDonald, Silver Donald Cameron, D.C. Troicuk, Sheldon Currie and many more — gathered under one rich and attractive roof. And these classic writers are only some of the authors this new volume has to share.
