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Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95The story of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters is a very old Mi’kmaw legend. It happens in the North Sky as the stars that show the story of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters move around Tatapn, the North Star.
In pictures in this book you can see how these stars, shown as they appear two hours before dawn, move through the night sky. They are in a different position each of the seasons because they are the time-keepers, the calendar. All through the year, as the stars and plants travel through the sky, the Mi’kmaq watch the story of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters as it unfolds before their eyes.
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The City Speaks in Drums (pb)
Artist: Susan TookePublisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Available for the first time in paperback, the award-winning The City Speaks in Drums follows two boys from North End Halifax as they explore their neighbourhood and the city beyond, finding music everywhere. At the skate park, by the Public Gardens, down Spring Garden Road, and on the boardwalk, drums and saxophones and dancers and basketballs create the jumbled, joyful, pulsing rhythm of Halifax. Shauntay Grant’s playful spoken word-style poem and Susan Tooke’s vivid illustrations create a wildly energetic and appealing journey through the big, bright city.
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Apples and Butterflies
Artist: Tamara Thiébaux-HeikaloPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95From patchwork-quilt farmland to the winding red roads, from sandy beaches to the endless stars at night, Apples and Butterflies shows Prince Edward Island shining in the bright blue and gold light of fall. Shauntay Grant’s award-winning poetry and Tamara Thiébaux Heikalo’s rich and wild illustrations pull the reader towards the wide-open space of the island. New softcover edition.
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Pier 21 Listen to My Story
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95Discover some of the most important moments of Canada’s history by getting to know the children and their families who arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21. From countries as far away as Estonia, Italy, and the Ukraine (just to name a few), these immigrants all travelled through the “gateway to freedom” to call Canada home.
“Guest child” Jamie from Scotland and Jewish orphan Mariette were both sent to Canada as children to escape the same war. Heili’s Estonian family boarded the Walnut to sail away from Russian Communist rule. Luigi’s family came from Italy to find work in Canada after the war, while Maryke’s arrived from Holland in search of farmland.
Now renamed the Canadian Museum of Immigration, Pier 21 accepted over one million new Canadians between 1928 and 1971. Many were nervous about their new home, but although they arrived from distinct countries and cultures, each family embraced the safety and possibility of a life in Canada. To arrive was to escape the past while keeping memories of their homelands close. Pier 21 was the first step toward a new life.
With over 40 photos, a glossary, timeline, and sidebar features on the pier itself and the home countries of those who passed through it, Pier 21: Listen to My Story provides an excellent introduction for chilldren to this key landmark in Canada’s immigration history.
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The Sky’s The Limit! Canadians Who Blazed a Trail in Aviation
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The first juvenile non-fiction book celebrating diverse Canadian aviators, from the author of Birchtown and the Black Loyalists.
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Anne of Green Gables & Anne of Avonlea
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$15.95A new series of beautiful bindups with cover illustrations by Briana Corr Scott brings readers affordable collectors? editions of the beloved Anne of Green Gables novels.
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Memoirs of a Lightkeeper’s Son 2nd edition
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95William (Billy) G. Budge was born in 1948 in the small fishing village of Neil’s Harbour on the northern tip of Cape Breton. In 1955 his father accepted the position of lighthouse keeper on St. Paul Island, a rugged and forlorn mountain in the sea. Positioned at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, this island is subject to violent gales, snowstorms and is often shrouded in fog. Early seafarers called it the “Graveyard of the Gulf” due to the vast numbers of ships and countless lives that were lost along its shores.
Billy moved to St. Paul Island with his parents and younger sister in September of 1955. For the next five years they lived at the southwest light station in almost total isolation. His family quickly learned to cope in a world without neighbours, electricity, schools, or any sports activities. They lived off the land – hunting ducks along the coast, berry picking, and jigging cod on the sea. Almost daily there were hardships to overcome and problems to be resolved. Life on the island was one of both tragedy and triumph. Billy tells his story of survival on that lonely rock. Sense the lush green of the island in summer in the midst of a crystal blue sea and feel the harshness of winter while buried under snow and surrounded by drift ice.
Share with Billy the excitement of unexpected guests, the arrival of a supply ship as well as the sadness of sickness and loss. Experience the many technical problems such as a fire in the lighthouse and learn how the entire family worked together to restore service.
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L’Nu’k: The People Mi’kmaw History, Culture and Heritage
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The Mi’kmaq lived in Canada long before the country even got its name. Before Europeans arrived, they lived in homes called wigwams and hunted and fished throughout the Maritime provinces, living off and giving back to the land. They enjoyed storytelling, drumming, and dancing within their tightknit communities.
In L’nuk: the Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada, First Nations educator Theresa Meuse traces the incredible lineage of today’s Mi’kmaq people, sharing the fascinating details behind their customs, traditions, and history. Discover the proper way to make Luski (Mi’kmaw bread), the technique required for intricate quillwork and canoebuilding, what happens at a powwow, and how North America earned its Indigenous name, Turtle Island.
Includes informative sidebars, highlighted glossary terms, recommended reading, a historic timeline, index, and over 60 fullcolour historical and contemporary images.
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Elapultiek (We Are Looking Towards) A Play
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Set in contemporary times, a young Mi’kmaw drum singer and a Euro-Nova Scotian biologist meet at dusk each day to count a population of endangered Chimney Swifts (kaktukopnji’jk). They quickly struggle with their differing views of the world. Through humour and story, the characters must come to terms with their own gifts and challenges as they dedicate efforts to the birds. Each “count night” reveals a deeper complexity of connection to land and history on a personal level.
Inspired by real-life species at risk work, shalan joudry originally wrote this story for an outdoor performance.
Elapultiek calls on all of us to take a step back from our routine lives and question how we may get to understand our past and work better together. The ideal of weaving between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds involves taking turns to speak and to listen, even through the most painful of stories, in order for us all to heal. We are in a time when sharing cultural, ecological, and personal stories is vital in working towards a peaceful shared territory, co-existing between peoples and nature.
“It’s a crucial time to have these conversations,” offers joudry. “The power of story can engage audience and readers in ways that moves them to ask more questions about the past and future.”
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Deportation of the Acadians
Publisher: Societe de Grand-Pre$5.95A condensed account of the deportation of the Acadians.
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Dykes & Aboiteaux
Publisher: Societe de Grand-Pre$5.95Sally Ross studied in France and taught the history and culture of French Canada for ten years and now works as an author, translator, and consultant.
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Whales of Bay of Fundy
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$6.95A concise guide to the various whales of the Bay of Fundy.
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Blacks
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$14.00This book documents the experience of the Blacks in the Maritimes, the difficulties they encountered and the institutions that sustained them. It profiles a selection of prominent individuals who overcame the prejudice and discrimination of a dominant culture to become outstanding in their careers while contributing to the greater good of society.
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Unspoken Truth Unmuted and Unfiltered
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95With strength and resilience, Africans have persevered through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and were able to rebuild a life after slavery while enduring the inhumane conditions of the civil rights Jim Crow era forced upon them by the African diaspora. The lack of acknowledgement of the generational trauma these events have had on their descendants continues to create further injury. Even today, barriers prevent their healing and transition from survival to a thriving existence.
Unspoken Truth is a bold collection of poetry highlighting the generational pain of Africans living in the diaspora. Through her poems, Bowden creates a panoramic view of the terrible conditions they endured for centuries. Deliberately, with dignity, she brings the trauma stories of African Nova Scotians told around kitchen tables for decades to the homes of readers while restoring the balance of humanity and royalty from which the African journey began. Despite all odds, they were able to preserve their lineage and lean on the resilience buried deep in their souls while passing this pride, culture, and strength on to future generations so they may one day fulfill the hopes and the dreams of the former slaves.
This collection seeks to spark the necessary conversations the larger society needs to engage in around the perseverance of systemic racism, a society now grappling to make the connections between historical trauma and current-day conditions of inequality. It summons the conscience of every reader to acknowledge the truth and reconcile it with their own dissonance. The poems pay homage to the ancestors, honour the elders, and provide inspiration for the youth so they can heal from this historical inheritance and build upon their own narratives.
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The Hermit of Africville The Life of Eddie Carvery
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95As Black Lives Matter protests swept the world, one of Canada’s greatest anti-racism fighters returned to reclaim the Black space and Black history to which he’s dedicated his life.
Eddie Carvery’s Africville protest reached its 50th year in 2020. He was just 23 when the City of Halifax bulldozed Africville, an African Nova Scotian village on the shores of the Bedford Basin. Under the disguise of “urban renewal” and using lies of a “home for a home,” the city destroyed every house and business before finally smashing the church in the middle of the night.
In the city, he found drugs, violence, and ultimately prison. His life was engulfed in tragedy and he hurt those he loved most. But in Africville, the land of his ancestors, he developed a great strength. His mind cleared and he saw the purpose of his life was to stand for Africville.
On a fine summer day in 1970, Eddie walked out to Africville, looked in sorrow at the ruins of his world, and decided to fight back. He pitched a tent and vowed to stay until everyone saw what he saw: that it was racist and wrong to destroy Africville, and that Halifax ought to give it back to its people.
Standing alone in Africville, he endured as racists set fire to his home, shot bullets at him, and tried again and again to drive him off the land.
This updated edition of The Hermit of Africville includes an introduction from Eddie himself reflecting on 50 years of fighting racism and his vision for a Canada that embraces all its peoples.
100% of the royalties from The Hermit of Africville go to Eddie Carvery and his Africville protest.
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Working from Home for a Harmonious Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Since Luc Desroches began working from his home office in 2016, he has been writing about how the move has allowed him to create a more harmonious life for both himself and his family. This book was mostly written pre-COVID-19, when working from home was more the exception than the rule. With almost every employee on the planet being encouraged to work from home where possible, COVID-19 has made the necessary transition from office to home more important than ever. Although there’s an explosion of teleworking articles with best practice tips, the author delves much deeper into the personal experience as he reflects on the values and teachings of the Mi’kmaq people who have worked from their homes for over ten thousand years.
The deeper messages of the book are perennial, which is what we need as we face unprecedented challenges. Now is an opportunity for millions of people to make a more informed decision on whether they should continue working from home or return to their pre-COVID workplaces. Now is a potential tipping point that could lead to a happier and healthier life for the individual and for society as a whole.
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The Peddlers The Fuller Brush Man, the Lords of Liniment and Door to Door Heroes in Nova Scotia and Beyond
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Peddlers is the story of the leading roles some Nova Scotians played in the North American door-to-door sales profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It starts with the life of Nova Scotia-born Alfred C. Fuller, the Fuller Brush Man, whose humble upbringing in the Annapolis Valley laid the foundation for what became one of the biggest businesses of its type in the world.
It also follows the career of Yarmouth County’s Frank Stanley Beveridge, who co-founded the highly successful Stanley Home Products company. From the tough times of the 1920s and 1930s, the story showcases the Lebanese immigrant backpack peddler Herman Rofihe who established a quality men’s wear store that served three generations.
The Peddlers takes you on a door-to-door tour of the origins of household brands like Minard’s and Sloan’s Liniment, JR Watkins and Rawleigh Products, Fraser’s Liniment, Gates Little Gem Pills, Buckley Cough Syrups, Muskol, and other medicinal enterprises founded by peddlers, many of them Nova Scotians. It also chronicles a century-old Hants County murder case involving two young peddlers — one the victim, the other the perpetrator.
Filled with these fascinating stories of Nova Scotia’s history in the door-to-door trade, The Peddlers is a tribute to the men and women of a bygone era in merchandising, the likes of which will never be seen again.
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The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Everyone remembers the famous food at Gladee’s Canteen, especially Gladee’s fish and chips and her coconut cream pie.” — Calvin Trillin
Gladee’s Canteen, several times voted as one of the ten best restaurants in Canada, was a special example of co-operative and communal spirit. At the centre of the operation were Gladee and her sister Flossie, supported by the extended Hirtle family. They offered a warm welcome and a memorable menu, in a setting brashly open to the forces of nature.
The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen tells the story of a popular Nova Scotia beach and a pioneer family who, against the odds, constructed a simple canteen at Hirtle’s Beach in1951 and ran it for forty years. The book draws on the author’s family associations, personal memory, and the outlying stockpile of collective recollections — a tapestry of events woven through the evolutionary fabric of a small, relatively isolated Maritime coastal community.
The era of Gladee’s Canteen is remarkable story that takes place in a small coastal Nova Scotia community blessed with a spectacularly dynamic living beach. In its time, the Hirtle family and its sparkling enterprise thrived in spite of relative isolation, uncertain funding, and domestic demons. As a Nova Scotia epic, the success story of Gladee’s Canteen mirrors the recent history of Hirtle’s Beach, exemplifying the twists and turns locked up in legend.
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Afraid of the Dark
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Through prose and poetry, Guyleigh Johnson tells the story of sixteen-year-old Kahlua Thomas. With a hard life at home, on the streets, and in school she finds an escape during her grade ten history class through writing poetry. Hiding in the back of the class, she writes, passionately expressing and releasing emotions about identity, home, community, culture, and forgiveness. All Kahlua wants is freedom, whatever that really means.
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The Smeltdog Man
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I brushed the crumbs off of the fish and back onto the counter, threw the smelts in the frying pan while I got the eggs out of the fridge and cracked one.”
The Smeltdog Man is the story of how a Cape Bretoner marshalled his accidental invention, a marijuana-induced, munchie-inspired Smeltdog, into the most successful fast food franchise in Canada. As president of his newly formed Good Karma Corporation, he tells the tale of how his business empire grows beyond his control, turning him into a billionaire.
While the business booms and the narrator’s wisdom is being constantly tapped for new ideas and strategies, he consults his Granddaddy Blue, whose pragmatic mixture of horse-trader economics and 1960s hippie ideals provide his grandson with the guiding principles and necessary scams he needs to survive in the corporate world.
From the simplicity of its origins to the ecological disaster of its success, The Smeltdog Man details the influences of country music on our narrator’s understanding of himself, the longing of unrequited love and the accumulation of wealth possessing more zeros than our hero can count.
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Through Sunlight and Shadows
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Through Sunlight and Shadows is an autobiographical novel about a young boy set in the small New Brunswick town of Bannonbridge in the 1940s and 1950s. The story is told from the perspective of an older man, Walt Macbride, a character well known to readers of other Raymond Fraser novels.
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The Other Side of the Sun The True Story of One Refugee’s Journey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95As one of the boat people refugees, Thien escaped war-torn Vietnam on a harrowing journey that landed him in a Malaysian refugee camp. Thien Tang had an ordinary childhood living in South Vietnam until it became a Communist state. His father feared persecution of his family and sent his fourteen-year-old son into hiding for over a year. Upon his return, Thien attended a local high school and found a classmate sweetheart. Life once again was good. But it wasn’t meant to last. Thien was forced to go back into hiding again with no hope of return. Like thousands of others, he fled Vietnam on a crowded boat in search of a new life. But first he had to cross the treacherous South China Sea to reach Malaysia.
Thien’s ship was attacked by pirates and shot at by police. On land, he and his fellow refuges were jailed, starved, and beaten, but survival only brought on tougher challenges. The soldiers forced them at gunpoint back into their damaged boat to be towed to sea. He sought asylum in the United States but found the refuge he was seeking in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where he lives today.
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Never Speak of This Again
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is 1917 and Nellie, seventeen years old and pregnant, has just returned to Cape Breton from Boston to find her lover. Instead of a safe haven, she encounters rejection and humiliation and is told to clear out and never speak of this again. Nellie’s story reflects the lives of many Nova Scotia women who found their way to Boston. Her world becomes a matter of daily survival, while so many in the world, including the stranger from Truro, try to survive the catastrophic chaos of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Never Speak of This Again takes the reader from eastern Canada to western Canada, to Europe, and back again.
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Lucy Cloud
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Filled with engaging characters, with their unique and lively Cape Breton voices, Lucy Cloud follows the fortunes and heartaches of a family with secrets and the intense longing to live fully. Anne Lévesque delivers an authentic tale of a time and a place, where people must be strong and inventive to make a good life.
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Breaking Disaster Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On December 6, 1917, the face of Halifax changed forever when the Imo, a Belgian Relief ship, collided with the French ship, the Mont Blanc. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Mont Blanc, which was carrying a large cargo of explosives, blew up. It destroyed much of the city’s north end and neighbouring communities like Tuft’s Cove and Dartmouth. The effect was catastrophic.
In Breaking Disaster, Ingram traces these details and stories as she pieces together the different narratives from the week that followed December 6, 1917, many of which have long faded into the larger story of the Halifax Explosion.
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Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It has been estimated that between fifteen to twenty thousand ships have meet their end along Canada’s eastern seaboard. Many of these wrecks happened between the 1800s to the mid-1900s when the season of bark, brig, brigantine and schooner came and went. This era left behind literally a vast volume – both recorded in print and preserved in local tales – of heroism and tragedy of mariners young and old.Prince Edward Island’s legacy of tales from the era of all-sail is great: from the wreck of the immigrant-laden Elizabeth at Cascumpec where the castaways were saved by a native; to the unique tale of PEI’s Jessy thrown onto St. Paul’s Island; to the strange tale of Rival caught in the “Yankee Gale” and the SS Quebec’s demise in the death-dealing tides of East Point, Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island, Volume I will fascinate and educate.Then again, island ships were involved with mystery, mayhem and wreck in practically all parts of the North Atlantic: gripped in sandbars of Sable Island, plundered on the rugged coasts of Newfoundland, drifting with no crew off Ireland, wrecked on Nova Scotia’s shores, stranded on the Magdalenes, and “Lost with Crew” in the vast Atlantic.Anything that could happen to a ship has happened to a Prince Edward Island hull and scores of tales within Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island present those weird and wonderful epics. Arranged chronologically, the stories are full of names of our seafaring ancestors, plus descriptions of the local ports that sheltered the ships.For over a hundred years the wooden sailing ship was an important and vital transportation link along the shores of Prince Edward Island. Its maritime records are full of stories in which local ships and their crews played an essential role. Self-sacrifice, daring, skill, wreck and rescue are all part of a fabric which makes up the history of the ships and the heritage of the villages that knew them. Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island has all this and more!
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Righting the Wrongs Gus Wedderburn’s Quest for Social Justice in Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Mary Riley was born and brought up in Nova Scotia. After graduating from Mount Saint Vincent and Carleton universities she worked as a journalist for the Calgary Herald and for the Canadian Press in Ottawa. In 1970 she went to West Africa with CUSO where she taught at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and the University of Ghana. Following graduate work at Simon Fraser University, she taught in the public relations program at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax until her retirement in 2008.
