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Prince Edward Island: Landscape and Light
Photographer: John SylvesterPublisher: Acorn Press$29.95In 2014, John Sylvester is celebrating his 30th year of photographing some of Canada’s most remarkable places. This book is a retrospective of his main inspiration — Prince Edward Island. It includes much new material, but also includes many beloved classic images that have graced the pages of his previous books. Prince Edward Island: Landscape and Light takes us on a journey showcasing John Sylvester’s approach to photography, not only making images at the edge of day and night, but also the nature of photographing on an Island, where both the landscape and the light inspires his spectacular work. Â
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Charlottetown: Then and Now
Photographer: W.Blair MacDonaldPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95D. Scott MacDonald’s father, W. Blair MacDonald had a keen interest in the changing landscape of Charlottetown, and documented a number of these changes with his slide camera. Instilled with a keen sense of history at an early age, Scott and his family have always treasured the work that their father did to preserve Charlottetown’s history. So, over 50 years later, Scott has nowretraced his father’s steps to record how the city has changed over that time. Standing in the exact spot where his father stood, Scott has captured how the streets and buildings of Charlotttown have changed and remained the same. Scott has also researched the history of the buildings he protrays, both back to his father’s time and much earlier. The result is a fascinating glimpse into why and how even a small city can change so much.
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Ni’n na L’nu The Mi’kmaq of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95- Winner of APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book AwardÂ
- Winner of PEI Book Award for Non-fiction
This lavishly-illustrated book tells a story through words and images that has never before been told, not in any single book. The focus is entirely on the Mi’kmaq of the Island, an island which for thousands of years has been known to the Mi’kmaq and their ancestors as Epekwitk. That name means “cradle on the sea” and no more poetic description of PEI has ever been penned. The story of the PEI Mi’kmaq is one of adaptation and perseverance across countless generations in the face of pervasive change. Today’s environment is far from what it was millennia ago. So too, the economy, society, lifestyle, language and religion of the people has witnessed some dramatic shifts. Nonetheless, despite all the changes, today’s Mi’kmaq feel deeply connected to the Island in its entirety and to their ancestors and the values they still share. This book tells those many stories, and communicates much more. While the book is a stand-alone publication, it is also a companion to a travelling exhibition of the same name.
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Acadian Traditions on Candlemas Day Candles, Pancakes and House Visits
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Georges Arsenault’s latest edition to the Acadian Traditions series Most English-speaking people just associate the 2nd of February, or Groundhog Day, with superstitions related to the weather. In Acadian communities, however, it was known as Candlemas Day and at one time was an important religious and social festivity. Pancakes were the symbolic food of choice. In many villages, young Acadians went from door-to-door collecting food for a communal feast or to give to the poor. This book by Georges Arsenault enables us to discover a festivity rich in traditions and a significant part of the cultural heritage of Acadians everywhere.
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All is Clam A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s Christmas at The Shores. There’s no snow yet, but there are so many outdoor lights that the tiny coastal village can be seen from space. Apart from Ian Simmons’ place, and he’s considered odd, there’s only one house in the village that isn’t lit up. It’s been dark for years. That’s about to change. Wild Rose Cottage is about to come to life, and death, once again. Meanwhile, the villagers wish for snow to complete the Christmas portrait. When it comes, it’s with the body of newcomer, Fitz Fitsimmons, a former acrobat turned bully and drunk. Mountie Jane Jamieson has seen murder here before, but none where she’d rather not catch the killer.
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Elaine Harrison: I am an Island that Dreams I am an Island that Dreams
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95Elaine Harrison was born in Petite-Rivere in Nova Scotia, but moved to Prince Edward Island to teach in 1938. There, she and her companion spent their summers at “Windswept,” the 200 year-old farmhouse on the cliffs near Seacow Head, where they lived a simple life, and for over fifty years were involved in the intellectual life of the Island and beyond, playing host to numerous summer visitors and corresponding with some of Canada’s top writers. In 1968, retirement gave Elaine the freedom to turn to her interests: her poetry, the campaigning for favoured causes, but above all her painting. Inspired by the Group of Seven, she found her subject matter in the cliffs and waves at Windswept, the sunflowers in her garden, the trees of the local hardwoods, and latterly her own cats and kitchen. In the early days she frequently gave her paintings away to anyone who appreciated them, but from the 1970s she began to get the recognition and financial returns they merited. She died in 2003, but her work is still much-loved by Islanders.
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An Island Christmas Reader (Updated edition)
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$17.95An Island Christmas Reader is a book about Christmas past and present on Prince Edward Island. In 22 stories and essays, David Weale combines reminiscences of Islanders with his own musings to rekindle the memory of Christmas, where imagination and magic work hand in hand to create the “unsullied wonder of childhood vision.”
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Mind Over Mussels A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Nothing big ever happens in The Shores. Ceilidhs, yes. Killings, no.
That all changes when amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister trips over a body on the beach and tumbles head first into a murder case. Cottager Lance Lord, dressed like Jimi Hendrix, has had his head split open with an axe. As Hurricane Angus storms up the coast, Hy and Mountie Jane Jamieson vie against the elements to uncover the murderer in a village where almost everyone has something to hide.
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The Little Book of Prince Edward Island
Photographer: John SylvesterPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95Award-winning photographer John Sylvester is back with a new book of stunning photography. Sylvester captures Prince Edward Island like no other photographer. With beautiful images of every corner of the Island in all seasons, The Little Book of Prince Edward Island is a charming and captivating look at the Island in all its colours. From the red dirt roads and green fields to the surrounding blue waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, John Sylvester’s imagery portrays the landscape that thousands of visitors from all over the world travel to see.
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Prince Edward Island Seafood : Local Fare, Global Flavours
Publisher: Acorn Press$12.95Paul Lucas is the executive chef of a world-famous seafood restaurant on the Charlottetown waterfront. He draws on local, classical, and international flavours to inspire and create original true fusion cuisine that is truly his own. He lives in Stratford with wife Bethany and their two children.
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Vet Behind the Years
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Bud Ings was born in 1926 on Prince Edward Island and graduated from the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, ON. He practised in rural King’s County, was a Liberal member of the legislative assembly, and served as agriculture and health ministers. A long-time member of the Queens County Fiddlers, Bud lives in Montague.
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Revenge of the Lobster Lover A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s lobster season at The Shores, a fishing village isolated from The Island in a storm surge. Parker, a collector of antiquities, has moved there with his partner Guillaume, a chef just out of rehab. “Hy” McAllister, a website writer looking for lobster recipes for a client’s newsletter, also needs a speaker for her Women’s Institute meeting. Enter Camilla, founder of the Lobster Liberation Legion, spouting crustacean right-to-life rhetoric. The legion starts freeing lobsters from their traps, angering the villagers and the man who runs Parker’s fisheries empire. In the tragic events that follow, the hidden connection between Parker, Guillaume and Camilla reveals itself.
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Afternoon Horses
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Deirdre Kessler teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her poetry has appeared in a number of collections, including The New Poets of Prince Edward Island and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, and in chapbook form: Subtracting by Seventeen. She is the author of five children’s novels, including the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Award-winning Brupp Rides Again, and six picture books, including perennial favourites Lobster in My Pocket, and Lena and the Whale.
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Fixer-Upper
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Funnyman Lorne Elliott’s take on Island life. When Bruno MacIntyre decides to rent his ramshackle cottage to summer tourists, the wacky merriment begins. Lorne Elliott, comic master of mirth and mayhem, takes us to Savage Bay on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, where the hapless Bruno turns to his clever and caustic Aunt Tillie for help in securing tenants. First, the cottage, inherited with a bad reputation from Bruno’s ne’r-do-well father, must be renovated. Then, Bruno must duel with his aunt’s wry insults and sly plans, a sardonic would-be author, and two torrid tenants. Elliott’s celebrated gifts for sharp-witted repartee and vivid characterizations are in full force. So, too, are Elliott’s keen eye and ear for our fumbling aspirations, bittersweet banterings, self-deceptions, hard-won wisdom, surprising tenderness, and zany outcomes. The Fixer-Upper–the novella adaptation of his play, Tourist Trap–is classic Lorne Elliott, with a brash and cheeky Maritime flavour.
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Acadian Mi-Carême
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95The rich traditions associated with Mi-Car’me or Mid-Lent are firmly anchored in the folkways of Acadian communities. To celebrate Mi-Car’me, people visited each other’s homes dressed up in masks and costumes. In the midst of the merrymaking, a mysterious character called the Mi-Car’me gave candies to little children and sometimes even delivered babies. But this strange individual scared many young Acadians because they feared he would take them away if they misbehaved.
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Shades of Green
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Brent MacLaine is Professor of English and a 3M Teaching Fellow at the University of Prince Edward Island where he teaches twentieth-century literature. He was born and grew up in the rural community of Rice Point, PEI, to which he returned after teaching at universities in Vancouver, Edmonton, China, and Singapore. In addition to numerous articles on modern literature and the literature of Atlantic Canada, he has published two volumes of poetry, Wind and Root (Vehicule 2000) and These Fields Were Rivers (Goose Lane 2004). He has also edited with Hugh MacDonald Landmarks: an Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land (Acorn 2001).
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House of Bears
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95When Luba Kassim reluctantly returns home to Northern Ontario, the strained relationship with her traditional Ukrainian mother only heightens her feelings of alienation and isolation. A family crisis reunites her extended family and reignites old rivalries and the pain of long-held family secrets. Slowly, Luba begins piecing together her family’s unspoken past, starting in the 1930s in Ukraine, followed by emigration to England and settlement in Canada. In the process, she uncovers some startling truths about her own identity, and learns that she and her mother have much more in common than she thinks.
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Acadian Christmas Traditions
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Based on written sources and interviews with Acadians throughout the Maritimes, Acadian Christmas Traditions offers a fascinating look at the evolution of Christmas. This very readable book shows how customs, both spiritual and secular, take hold in families, in villages, and in a culture as a whole. Georges Arsenault, the well-known historian and folklorist, examines all the aspects of the feast of Christmas, from midnight mass to holiday foods. As he chronicles the cultural changes that have taken place over the centuries, he proves that Acadian Christmas today is the result of a wonderful blending of old, new, and borrowed traditions.
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Along Lot Seven Shore
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Often, folksongs are left to stand alone, with no record as to the events, visions and principles that inspired them. Rarely do we get a glimpse of the poet’s view of the community and people he or she writes about. However, Donnie Doyle, in wanting to give something back to his community, has done just that. Along Lot Seven Shore is a fascinating combination of memoir, anecdote, narrative song and poetry, created by someone who has experienced that which he has written. In so doing, he shares glimpses of a way of life that makes and defines “community”; this particular community happens to be along Lot Seven Shore of Prince Edward Island (named so when the Island was divided into 67 lots and given in a Land Lottery to the English King’s patrons in 1767), but it could be anywhere in rural Canada.
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A Long Way From the Road
Publisher: Acorn Press$13.95A collection of 77 anecdotes, this book is humorous and sardonic, insightful and witty, with the warmth and charm for which Atlantic Canada has become famous. Subjects that come under the microscope include politics, religion, sex, human foibles, and insularity that can come from living on a small island.
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North Shore of Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Since it was first published in 1986, Frank Ledwell’s The North Shore of Home has had an enduring place in Island literature. In warm-hearted prose and poetry, in a voice keenly tuned to the music of Prince Edward Island English, Ledwell explores the Island’s North Shore, and especially the richly historied community of St. Peter’s Bay. Taken together, his poems and stories create a portrait of a community surviving through the Depression and the Second World War – a community at the Island’s edge and at the very cusp of the dramatic changes that would affect all small Prince Edward Island communities in the postwar years.
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Island Sketchbook
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95With characteristic warmth, generosity, and humour, Frank Ledwell seamlessly weaves personal memoir and communal folk wisdom into 60 prose sketches of Island characters, anecdotes, and traditions. The stories are based on real people or incidents; others are fictionalized, evoking the true, remembered landscape of Ledwell’s childhood at St. Peter’s Bay on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, his experience as a student, teacher, and professor at St. Dunstan’s University, and his later life as a professor, husband, and parent in rural Queen’s County. The sketches also evoke the author’s love of people and place and mark his point of view as that of an inveterate Islander.
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Jean Pierre Roma
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95During the four years poet Jill MacLean lived in Prince Edward Island, she researched Jean Pierre Roma’s settlement at Trois Rivières. Her first collection, The Brevity of Red, was published in 2003. She now lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia.
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Atlantic Schooners
Publisher: Brunswick Press$6.95Noted marine artist and historic illustrator L.B. Jenson has produced a number of publications that feature the history and heritage of Nova Scotia’s ocean-going traditions including his most ambitious work, Bluenose 11, Sage of the Great Fishing Schooners.
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Mi’kmaq
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Another in the series of books detailing the culture of the many people who make up the population of the Maritimes. A history of origins, settlement and contribution to Maritime life.
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End of the Line The Dominion Atlantic Railway – A Trip Back in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95There was a time when railways criss-crossed Nova Scotia, carrying passengers and delivering mail, moving freight and produce, hauling timber, coal, gypsum, and iron ore. But those days have passed thanks in large measure to the advent of the automobile, improved highways, long-haul trucking, and the vagaries of market demands and resource extraction. The number of railways operating today in the province can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over.
Vestiges of Nova Scotia’s railway heritage are disappearing. Tracks are now Rails to Trails; trestle bridges have deteriorated to decrepitude; and train stations, once the arterial pulse for so many communities, have, for the most part, disappeared. Most poignant, perhaps, is the silencing of that magical, haunting train whistle.
Mike Parker’s latest book End of the Line follows a similar track as three of his earlier best-selling books about ghost towns and deserted island settlements. Presented in Mike’s popular storytelling style, and drawing upon more than 430 images, many of them in colour, End of the Line opens another window to the past, taking the reader for a nostalgic trip back in time on the abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railway along the once-famous Land of Evangeline route from Yarmouth to Halifax through the heart of the Annapolis Valley.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1894-1994), which closed just one month and five days short of its one hundredth birthday. There have been many railways but none more storied than the D.A.R., considered to be “one of the more important pages out of Nova Scotia history.”
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Halifax A Literary Portrait
Editor: John BellPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Halifax: A Literary Portrait is a lively anthology of thirty-one selected writings about this colourful Nova Scotian port city dating from the early eighteenth century to the present. Included are works by such varied writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, L.M. Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, Will R. Bird, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, bill bissett and Spider Robinson.
Halifax is captured in its many moods, and the selections, while not always complimentary, are sure to entertain and illuminate.
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Destination White Point
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95White Point Beach Lodge has been in operation since 1928, persevering through early bankruptcy, the Great Depression, World War II, and a sometimes unforgiving climate in the hospitality industry. The resort is situated on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where authors Zane Grey and Albert Bigelow Paine once travelled to write about the charms of the undisturbed wilderness.The evolution of tourism in southwest Nova Scotia owes much of its early progress to well-connected foreign anglers and hunters, who used their own pipelines to broadcast this Canadian destination as a bountiful game reserve and a gem for tourists to discover. This book depicts the contribution of some of these foreigners, notably Philip Hooper Moore, the creator of White Point. His conception was a vacation haven where discerning sportsmen could hunt and fish while their families enjoyed the state-of-the-art amenities at the resort. The Lodge remained a seasonal destination for several decades until the 1980s heralded a shift to year-round operations. A convention centre and more accommodations were added, all designed to blend with the original rustic log buildings.Destination White Point draws on the oral history of former and current staff and guests, some whose experiences date back to the 1930s, to paint authentic pictures of work and play at White Point. The descendants of a number of guests have perpetuated the White Point vacation tradition, travelling from New England as well as Upper and Lower Canada on an annual basis. Multi-generational connections are commonplace at White Point with a half-dozen or more family members employed at the resort across several decades.For the last thirty years or so, stories of ghostly sightings and manifestations have been circulating around the property. One of the supernatural visitors is believed to be Ivy Elliot, who co-managed White Point with her husband Howard for over forty years. These events recently attracted a group of paranormal investigators, who paid a visit to White Point. Since the 1980s, colourful rabbits have delighted children and adults alike. Today, the lodge remains a popular destination for both Canadians and foreigners and a vital link to our storied past.
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Otto Strasser in Paradise
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95H. Millard Wright was born and grew up in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. He had a successful business career, becoming a vice-president and board member of L.E. Shaw Ltd. And president of Clayton Developments. He is a past president of the Halifax Board of Trade, a past director of the Maritime Chamber of Commerce, past director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and past director of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. He formed his own company, Colonial Scientific Ltd., in 1971 and retired in 1992. He has published eight books.
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Diligent River Daughter
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster, who for many years was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. Bruce and his wife Helen live in their hometown of Parrsboro. Diligent River Daughter is his fifth book. The Ship’s Company Theatre adapted two of his previous novels – The Parrsboro Boxing Club and Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours, both published by Pottersfield – for the stage.
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Long Ago and Far Away
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Wayne Curtis was born and raised in the rural Miramichi community of Keenan. A high school dropout, he has worked at many jobs in the woods and in factories, including six years with General Motors. He has also been a storekeeper and a river guide. Returning to school during his adult years, he took night courses to get his high school diploma, followed by three years of university, eventually earning an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas University. Wayne has written for The Globe and Mail and The National Post and is the author of three novels, four books of short stories and a screenplay for the CBC. Long Ago and Far Away is his thirteenth book.