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Years Before Anne (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Francis W. P. Bolger, who teaches history at the University of Prince Edward Island, has compiled an informative and complete picture of the fascinating life and brilliant career of Lucy Maud Montgomery, drawing on her scrapbooks, letters, diaries, photos and conversations with family members.
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Herreshoff
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$65.95Franco Pace is a yachting photographer of international repute, known for his stunning action shots and superb composition. His work regularly appears in the major international yachting magazines, and he has several other books to his credit, including William Fife: Master of the Classic Yacht and Sparkman & Stephens: Classic Modern Yachts. Franco Pace lives in Trieste, Italy.
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Le trésor d`Elvis Bozec
Publisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$9.95Elvis Bozec a un rêve : découvrir des vestiges laissés par les marins français qui sont venus, il y a très longtemps, pêcher la morue à Terre-Neuve. Avec l’aide de sa sœur et d’un vieux monsieur sympathique, réussira-t-il à retrouver les traces de son ancêtre sur l’île Rouge, où l’on ne voit pourtant plus rien du passage des Bretons ?
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I Owe It All to Rock & Roll(and the CBC)
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this hilarious and insightful memoir, Frank Cameron takes readers from his childhood to his professional days at CHNS and then the CBC and on to his present life, hosting a show at Seaside FM. Frank just can’t get radio out of his blood. In between is a satisfying chronicle of a media personality who never takes himself too seriously. Frank is funny, but he also doesn’t shy away from stating his opinions and telling it like it is.
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Dip & Veer Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Frank Ledwell has previously published one volume of prose and poetry, The North Shore of Home (Acorn Press, 2002) and two collections of poetry, Crowbush and Other Poems (Ragweed, 1990) and Dip & Veer: Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville (Acorn Press, 1996). He has performed as a popular storyteller in venues across Prince Edward Island. Frank Ledwell is a Professor Emeritus of the English Department of the University of Prince Edward Island, where he taught creative writing for many years. He was the first recipient of the PEI Council of the Arts’ Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts, and for many years was known as the Island’s unofficial poet laureate.
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Taste of Water
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95The taste of water is something we all know but need to be reminded of once in a while: how it tastes of shared memory, and of what it means to be human, and of the earth.Prince Edward Island’s second Poet Laureate, Frank Ledwell, invites us to enter his words and world, seeking to share a sense of our common humanity and our interdependent fates, and to recognize communal experience in the particularities of personal experience.The traditional role of the Poet Laureate is to mark occasions, and Ledwell’s poems masterfully make quotidian Island events and lives into special occasions that sing with the “spirit of the spoken word taking hold.”
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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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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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TR’s Adventure at Angus the Wheeler’s
Artist: Virginia McCoyPublisher: Cape Breton University Press$14.95On a warm summer day, ten-year-old T.R. decides to share a secret with his bored brothers, the Terrible Twins and Sunny James. Elves and Fairies live in the garden of their neighbor.
But all is not well in this secret garden; Guks have abducted a Princess and are holding her hostage at a farmhouse known as Angus the Wheeler’s. T.R., the Terrible Twins and Sunny James team up with the Fairies and set out to free the Princess.
What follows is an epic battle between the Fairies and the Guks and T.R. has to use his own gentle magic against a darker magic to free the Princess and protect the Fairies.
Filled with wonder and strong characters—and, best of all, a happy ending—T.R.’s Adventureis supported by colourful and fanciful illustrations making it suitable for young readers and younger audiences.
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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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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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A Forest for Calum
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The story is Roddie’s. The stage is his guardian and grandfather Calum’s. A quiet and stoic man, Calum Gillies and his aging friends illuminate for us the changing world around them: the loss of the coal mines, the labour strife and lean years endured, the religious parochialism that divides families and communities and, most important, a disappearing language. The setting is Cape Breton; the themes of cultural and rural change and decline are universal.
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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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Jerome
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95For many Nova Scotians the name Jerome is synonymous with Maritime mystery, much like Oak Island, the Marie Celeste, or the Shag Harbour UFO crash. Jerome was the name given to the nearly dead, legless stranger who washed up on a Digby Neck beach in 1863. During the next fifty years, Jerome spoke only a few words and never revealed his identity.
Author Fraser Mooney Jr. embarked on a ten-year investigation to find the remarkable truth about Jerome. Using newspaper articles, historic documents, and interviews, Mooney explores and dispels the myths that have long been associated with Jerome and provides amazing detail about his life on Digby Neck. He takes us through Jerome’s life-from his appearance on the beach, through the time he spent living with a number of families in the region, to his death. Most importantly, Mooney discovers the truth behind the identity of the anonymous, mutilated man who took his secret to the grave. Including photos of Jerome, the beach where he was discovered, and those who knew him, Jerome is an incredibly well researched, intriguing book that will appeal to readers who enjoy Maritime mysteries and historical non-fiction. -
Better Off Dead Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Canadian Armed Forces
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Fred Doucette always wanted to be a soldier. In the 1960s he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and served in Cyprus in the 1970s and ’80s and Bosnia in the 1990s. When he returned home to New Brunswick in 1999 after his last overseas tour, he was diagnosed with severe chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually released from the army, Fred found a position with the Operational Stress Injury Social Support (OSISS) program, where he supported serving soldiers and veterans for ten years.
Better Off Dead chronicles Fred’s efforts in helping to rehabilitate and support soldiers and veterans suffering from what the military terms “operational stress injuries.” We meet Ted, saved from a suicide attempt by a timely phone call; Bob, at wit’s end and reluctantly seeking help to overcome severe PTSD; Roger, caught in a cycle of violence and drug and alcohol abuse; and Jane, diagnosed with PTSD after having been sexually assaulted while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. These accounts are raw, desperate, and often angry, but as Doucette shows, there is hope and real progress for those able to obtain proper diagnosis and treatment. Includes a colour insert with 15 photos.
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Windjammers Downeast
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$14.95The images in this book are termed photographic impressions–paintings created from photos and software, using a stylus as the paintbrush, producing a unique form of artwork.
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Prince Henry Sinclair
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95It is one of the anomalies of human history that despite our passion for knowledge, we are still in doubt as to who actually “discovered” the North American continent. According to author/historian Fredrick J. Pohl, the glory should go to none other than Prince Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, who set off on a voyage of discovery for “a very great country” and dropped anchor in Guysborough Harbour, Nova Scotia, on June 2, 1398 almost a century before Columbus’s and Cabot’s Historic voyages.
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Dis dix dinosaures / Say Ten Dinosaurs
Artist: Denise PaquettePublisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$8.95This is Bouton d’or Acadie’s first foray into the world of dinosaurs. Dis dix dinosaures steps into a burgeoning world where each page is an opportunity for children to have fun counting and associating details of the images to numbers. On the splash page, one finds the scientific names of dinosaurs frequently found in other works, but (in our opinion) never illustrated with such stunning colours. Denise Paquette, one of Acadie’s most seasoned illustrators, had the time of her life with this one. As for the Moncton author Gaëtane Pinet, with such imagination, she makes a striking debut!
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A Breed Apart
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95This is the best-selling story of Nova Scotia’s famous tolling dog. The legends and stories of the old tolling men and their dogs of Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, is part fact and part fiction. Here, at last, is the full story of the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever and the men and women who bred them, trained them and brought them to prominence.
The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever is Canada’s first and only true Canadian bred dog. For almost two hundred years the dog was unknown outside of southwestern Nova Scotia. The dog’s particular hunting technique – tolling – was first recorded in North America by Nicholas Denys and became part of the folklore of the Maritimes. Straight out of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” is the dog’s astonishing ability to lure waterfowl.
This powerful and mesmerizing effect in drawing waterfowl toward the shore is just one of the many intriguing secrets associated with this amazing canine. Gail MacMillan became enthralled with Tollers many years ago and became determined to unlock the dog’s engaging past.
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Tommy’s New Block Skates PB
Artist: David Preston SmithPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95In a small town in Nova Scotia, Tommy is dreaming about skating on Half-mile Pond. He will skate fast, make circles and fancy figures on the ice, maybe even play hockey…as soon as he has his very own skates. Join Tommy in discovering how old-fashioned block skates are made. Will Tommy’s new block skates be ready by winter?
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Historic Windsor
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Windsor has undergone a dramatic change in appearance over the years due to complete changes of inhabitants, from Mi’kmaq to Acadians to British. A fire destroyed the town in 1897, which led to the construction of a new set of buildings and, as a result, all new streetscapes. The images collected here will be a revelation to many Windsorians, who will not recognize the town that they have known. Many of the inhabitants who have been important to the town will not be familiar either. Historic Windsor promises to offer a portrait of the town through images that will waken the memory, but teach as well.
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Dominion Atlantic Railway 1894-1994
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95For a hundred years (1894–1994), the Dominion Atlantic Railway served the people of western Nova Scotia—from Yarmouth to Halifax—faithfully. In this new edition to the Images of Our Past series, author Gary Ness traces the history of the line through gorgeous photographs and fascinating stories from the people who worked along the route and the passengers who used the trains to travel through the heart of the Annapolis Valley. Includes over 150 black and white photos.
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Trees of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95An informative guide to 45 native and exotic species of trees and shrubs that inhabit Nova Scotia.
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Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Growing Up With Julie is the story of Gerry Steele’s childhood with a French-speaking mother in an English-speaking community. Set in Miscouche, near Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in the early part of the 20th century, the story is an historical snapshot of a life heavily influenced by the Catholic church, poverty and the Depression, alcoholism, and cultural tensions between the Acadians and the Scots. At the head of the family is Steele’s grandmother, a woman unwavering in her beliefs—regardless of their merit, validity, or tendency to offend. It is also a story of one woman’s determination to educate her children in a hard-living rural society coming to terms with modernity.
Gifted with an excellent memory for detail, Gerry Steele delivers a story that is rich in integrity and precision, with a good dose of humour to brighten up the dark corners.
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Cape Breton Tastes
$22.95Mouth-watering recipes from twenty eight of Cape Breton’s best restaurants.
Cape Breton Tastes presents but a sample of the food available on the island of Cape Breton. If the recipes from local restaurants don’t whet your appetite, then the vivid colour photographs of these dishes surely will. Featuring restaurants from all over the island map-from Ingonish to Arichat-this book is your guide whether you are looking for a bowl of chowder and a homemade biscuit or a hearty meal of lamb, pork,
or roasted goose. Of course, don’t leave without tasting the wondrous bounty of the island’s seas and rivers, or one of the fine desserts worth lingering over. Whatever dish you choose, you won’t be disappointed.
This book features twenty-eight different restaurants from around the island, and includes recipes for starters, soups, meat, seafood, pasta, and desserts. -
Yankees at Louisbourg The Story of the First Siege, 1745
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95“The best and fullest account of the first siege of Louisbourg,” wrote historian W.S. MacNutt. The reader is there for the planning and the rabble-rousing and the day-by-day details of this essential event in Canadian history and in Americanconsciousness. L.E. DeForest called “the capture of Louisbourg in 1745 the most important military achievement of the American Colonists prior to the War of the Revolution.” Told in considerable depth and detail, this extremely readable book accounts for and describes that colonial achievement, and George Rawlyk’s telling is considered the most complete and best book on the subject.“An excellent, fair, comprehensive history of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg.” — Goodreads
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Acadian Legends, Folktales and Songs
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Island historian and folklorist Georges Arsenault has been collecting songs and stories from Acadian Prince Edward Island since his student days in the 1970s: words gathered by lamplight in the early part of the 20th century, when the local men and women would pass on what they’d learned from elders long gone. His 17 informants were mostly hard-working parents of very large families, some well-educated and some not. Included in this collection are 8 stories, 13 legends and 23 songs with lyrics and musical notation, mainly reproduced from taped interviews. Originally published as Contes, legendes et chansons de l’Île-du-Prince-Edouard, this English translation by Sally Ross includes footnotes and a bibliography, as well as photos of his informants
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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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Lasso the Wind Aurelia’s Verses and other Poems
Artist: Susan TookePublisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95George Elliot Clarke started writing poems for his daughter the day she was born.Tooke, a three-time winner of the Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration, aprroached Clarke (Regarding their collaboration).For this 24-page hardcover book, she has created bold and graphic collaged images, ranging from a grim image of imprisoned families to a whimsical vision of a dragon at a picnic to endearing pictures of Aurealia as a baby.This book is aimed at kids aged seven to fourteen and the birthday poems end at age nine because they “have a particular sequential feel” says Clarke, a Windsor born, prize winningpoet laureate of Toronto and teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto
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Portia White A Portrait in Words
Artist: Lara MartinaPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95George Elliott Clarke brings his lyrical brilliance to this personal story, an ode to his great-aunt, the internationally celebrated opera contralto Portia White. From her early years in Halifax to her performance before Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1964, the trailblazing, music-filled life of White is celebrated in this stirring tribute, with illustrations from artist Lara Martina.