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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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Damaged Goods
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95The line between personal and professional begin to blur for Jack McMorrow while pursuing a story about a mysterious woman. At the same time, his family becomes a target after Roxanne removes a satanists’ children from his custody. As dangers converge, who will put their life on the line?
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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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Pretty Dead
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95Family secrets will get out…and the ramifications get gruesome in Pretty Dead, the seventh Jack McMorrow Mystery. In this widely acclaimed addition to the popular series, veteran reporter Jack McMorrow and his partner Roxanne are sent to investigate the alleged physical abuse of a young daughter of a Boston blue blood family. The trappings of elite society threaten to sidetrack Jack’s investigation of the family’s misdoings, until a beautiful woman is found dead and the carefully constructed image of the family’s wealth and power begins to fray. Loyalties are tested and bonds are broken as Jack struggles with one of his most potent adversaries yet: his own ambition.
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Closer All the Time
Publisher: Islandport Press$19.95The residents of Baxter, Maine, are going nowhere fast–but not for lack of trying. In this artfully written jewel of a novel, award-winning author Jim Nichols strings together the bittersweet stories of people bound together by shared geography and the insular nature of small-town life. There’s Johnny Lunden, a well-meaning war veteran with a penchant for the local bar and a deep, but doomed, love for his family; eight-year-old Ted Soule, who shares a first kiss with the Ophelia-like Nadia, the daughter of his Russian neighbors; and Tomi Lambert who watches the confused adults around her struggle to accept their fates. In a wonderfully authentic New England setting, Nichols explores the nature of connection–hoped for, missed, lost, and found. Winner of the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Best Fiction.
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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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Cover Story
Publisher: Islandport Press$16.95Crime Reporter Jack McMorrow returns to his old beat at The New York Times and just when he thinks he has found a huge story when the mayor is found murdered, things go awry – Jack suddenly emerges as a prime suspect in his own story.
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Straw Man
Publisher: Islandport Press$24.95In Straw Man, crime reporter Jack McMorrow and his wife, Roxanne, have settled into small town life in Prosperity, Maine. But the town isn’t as sheltered as they thought. When violence breaks out, the couple are forced to face their most destructive enemies yet – each other.
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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.
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The Blue Room Poems
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95To get a sense of the significance of Carlo Spinazzola’s work, it is important to see it in the context of the full breath of the artistic undertakings he applied himself to. To see him as just a poet, or musician, or a painter, is to miss the spirit that ran through all his work. He was all these things at once –his artistic output flowed naturally, taking a number of forms, always in the same spirit.His life and his work spoke the same honest message, and this honesty gave all of his endeavours a depth, commitment and truthfulness that is unmistakable. Carlo and his blues lived together, and together they created for us a powerful legacy of words, music, art and memory.Whether his inner torments instigated his creativity or were the necessary payment exacted for his gifts is a moot point, for in the end Carlo succumbed to his demons. In 2003 the blues carried him away at the age of thirty-three.By turns funny, crude and, above all, moving, The Blue Room is the work of a true artist. The poems gathered from notebooks written throughout Spinazzola’s lifetime and the artwork gathered from friends are the expressions of a young artist of our generation.
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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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Beartan Briste
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95Born in Dublin, Ireland, Rody Gorman is Writer-in-Residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye. He has worked as writing fellow at the University College Cork and the University of Manitoba and is editor of the annual Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry anthology An Guth. He has published a wide range of poetry collections and his selected poems in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Chernilo, were published by Coiscéim in 2006.
Beartan Briste is the latest collection from this prolific Gaelic poet. His highly original English “intertongueings” are wonderfully entertaining in their own right – providing insight not only to the nature of his poetry, but the nature of Gaelic interpretation.
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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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As A’Bhraighe
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$22.95It has been said that the greatest Gaelic poets were from Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands. Those who emigrated to Nova Scotia in the 18th and 19th centuries were the living memory of clan history and tradition. Allan the Ridge MacDonald stands out as one poet who inherited and maintained an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary and a superior knowledge of clan and legendary history. In this first compilation and translation of the known Gaelic songs of Allan the Ridge in print, Effie Rankin gives all readers an insight into the life of the poet and the traditions that made him a highly regarded seanchaidh.
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The Wedding Reels
Publisher: Breton Books$16.00Not for the faint of heart, Joyce Rankin’s new book returns to the traditional roots she mined for At My Mother`s Door. Now in The Wedding Reels she has gone more to the heart of the moments of grief and doubt that we so often carry alone, and for which we rarely have the words. Eventually, love does abide, and her loyalty to place shines through even the darkest moments life can offer. This is the intimate poetry of the storyteller — frank, clear, unforgettable.“Joyce Rankin`s The Wedding Reels is a collection of poetry whose subjects are as local as a square dance, whose themes are as universal as life itself.” — Frank Macdonald, author of A Forest for Calum.Poet George Elliott Clarke called Joyce Rankin`s best-selling first book “a hymn of survival and settlement.”
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I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything
Publisher: Breton Books$16.00“Controlled, fluid, wry and passionate.” —Halifax Daily NewsA generous serving of new and selected poems. Lesley Choyce was declared “a national treasure” by the Ottawa Citizen and “Nova Scotia’s answer to the Renaissance Man” by CBC’s Peter Gzowski. Quill and Quire found Lesley Choyce’s writing “life enhancing, life celebrating.” For a taste of this lasting collection, you can watch Lesley read the title poem “I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything,” which is available on youtube.
