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One Strong Girl
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95One Strong Girl is a mother’s vivid account of what it is like to lose her daughter, India, to a rare debilitating disease. The story is a bold description of what it means to deal with deep sorrow and still find balance and beauty in an age steeped in the denial of death. At ten, India climbed the highest on the rope at gymnastics, yet by sixteen was so weak she was unable to even dress herself. The narrative follows the six-year fight for answers from the medical community. Finally, after the genetic testing of India’s DNA, it was discovered there were two mutations on her ASAH1 gene, a deadly combination. Today her cells are alive in a research lab at the University of Ottawa. This is a legacy that cuts both ways, a point of pride and pain. One Strong Girl is a story of what it’s like to outlive an only child. It describes the intensity of loving a dying child and most importantly, the joy to be found, even amidst the sorrow.
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Short Mercy
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Winner of the John and Margaret Savage First Book Award for Fiction at the 2022 Atlantic Book Awards.
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A Dangerous Age A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“Fishermen have a powerful bond, a brotherhood that extends well beyond their own community. Flares from their trawlers soared high into the sky, helping to illuminate the search site. Out of the fog appeared a fishing vessel heading straight for us. It looked as though it was going to hit us broadside when it turned at the last minute.”
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Madness, Mayhem and Murder More True Tales of Crime and Justice from Nova Scotia’s Past
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Meet the larger-than-life characters from Nova Scotia’s past who broke the law as well as the mold.
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Down Home for Christmas – Holiday Stories from Atlantic Canada
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Down Home for Christmas offers a rich tapestry of seasonal stories from some of Pottersfield Press’s most talented and beloved authors and is sure to touch both those who love Christmas and those who enjoy the entire winter season in our rugged Down East region.
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In Their Own Words
$21.95What was the First World War really like for Maritimers overseas? This epistolary book, edited by historian Ross Hebb, contains the letters home of three Maritimers with distinct wartime experiences: a front-line soldier from Nova Scotia, a nurse from New Brunswick, and a conscripted fisherman from Prince Edward Island. Up until now, these complete sets of handwritten letters have remained with the families, who agreed to share them in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War’s end in 2018. These letters not only give insight into the war, but provide greater understanding of life in rural Maritime communities in the early 1900s.
In Their Own Words includes a learned introduction and background information on letter writers Eugene A. Poole, Sister Pauline Balloch, and Herry Heckbert, enabling readers to appreciate the context of these letters and their importance.
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The Perfect Day and Other Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Favourably reviewing Harry Bruce’s Down Home: Notes of a Native Son more than 30 years ago, a critic in The Globe and Mail reported that it was from this book he’d learned that Nova Scotians often judged people or things on an ascending scale of merit that went like this: “good, some good, right some good, or right some Jesus good.” Down Home, he decided, was “right some good.”
Other critics have been less reticent. Bruce’s writing has inspired them to call him no less than “a consummate storyteller”; to marvel over his “magnetic style and marvelous command of the language”; to declare his prose “highly entertaining and gloriously informative”; and to insist that “only the spiritually dead or terminally obtuse could fail to come away from it richer for the experience.” About one collection of his works a reviewer decided, “We are obviously in the hands of a master.” Surely a master is right some Jesus good.
And now, The Perfect Day and Other Stories offers the best of Bruce’s best essays. From the sweet pain of first love and leaving home to the horrors of killer wasps, bloodthirsty flies, and marauding mice, from the relief experienced in every outhouse in the pines to the joy resounding from neighbourhood curling on a Scottish laird’s frozen pond, from the magic mist that sneaks into a ghost village on an abandoned island off Lunenburg to the sheer glory that parades of tall ships grant to great ports around the world, from fogs, bats, cats, and coyotes to the whales, thrones, stags, and steeples that make Atlantic Canada unique…they’re all here, and more, in Harry’s latest collection.
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The Race to the Bottom How Scuba Diving in Nova Scotia Saved My Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This is the story of one man’s hobby and its overwhelmingly positive effect physically, emotionally, socially, and mentally on his life. The hobby is scuba diving, but not on the reefs of southern seas. This is about diving in Halifax Harbour. Diving summer and winter in one of the biggest and deepest harbours in the world has given Bob a view of history that few will ever witness.
Inquisitive and energetic, the author spins yarns about the strange and fascinating objects he finds and the hair-raising moments he has experienced, from coming to the surface and seeing the boat drifting out of sight to arriving on the surface in a snowstorm and having to navigate by compass to find the shore.
The bottom of Halifax Harbour has collected artifacts over the centuries from around the world. Each find gets picked up, cleaned, researched, and documented. The author’s database is a gold mine of little details about what arrived, eventually got dumped into the ocean, and is now sitting on display at home and in museums as a reminder of what once was.
The author takes the reader under warships, container ships, and tugboats, through huge docks, and under the ice. Along the way, he reflects on the toll that our civilization is taking on the ocean, of seagulls trying to break open golf balls to find food, of crabs trapped inside tires, and fish that take refuge in castoff bottles and grow too big to stay in but also too big to get out.
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Nova Scotia Politics 1945-2020 From Macdonald to MacNeil
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Who has held political power in Nova Scotia? How did they get it? And what did they do with it? In his latest book, best-selling author and former cabinet minister Graham Steele takes us on a roller-coaster ride through seventy-five years of Nova Scotia politics from 1945 to 2020.
The story ranges from Angus L. Macdonald, who won a crushing election victory in 1945 after a bitter falling-out with prime minister Mackenzie King, to Stephen McNeil, who provoked the first-ever teachers’ strike yet won the first back-to-back majorities in thirty years. It covers premiers from the calm intellectual Robert Stanfield, to the acerbic outsider Donald Cameron, to the aloof reformer John Savage, and highlights trailblazers like Gladys Porter, Wayne Adams, and Donald Marshall Jr.
Nova Scotia politics has seen an almost unnatural focus on jobs, roads, and corruption. Steele doesn’t shy away from the controversial parts of our political history: the trial of Gerald Regan for sexual crimes; the political pressure that led to the opening of the ill-starred Westray mine; and the environmental racism that pumped effluent into Boat Harbour for fifty years.
This is a book for anyone interested in modern Nova Scotia history or politics. It’s for the avid politics-watcher, of course, but also for the new voter, the newcomer, the new parent, the newly retired—anyone who wants some historical depth by which to understand today’s politics.
Steele pulls together the threads of history, adding original stories and archival research to the existing rich vein of historical writing, and then applies his own political experience to find the through lines that tie together past, present, and future.
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No Thanks, I Want to Walk Two Months on Foot Around New Brunswick and the Gaspé
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I found that the landscape had a deep effect on my mood: cliffs towering above, a narrow strip of earth to follow, the vast ocean opening up before me. I felt changed.”
After completing a 3,000-kilometre hike of coastal Nova Scotia and making a number of dramatic changes in her life, Emily Taylor Smith is compelled to undertake another Maritime journey on foot, this time following the coastline of New Brunswick and the Gaspé all the way to Quebec City.
She plans a solitary trip, searching for life lessons along the way and carrying everything she needs with her on her back. Emily severely underestimates the Fundy Footpath, struggles to communicate in French, nearly throws in the towel at the tip of Kouchibouguac Park, and survives a sleepless night in a collapsed tent on the windy Gaspé shore.
What she doesn’t count on is the support which appears daily in the form of roadside messages, random gifts of ice cream, generous postmistresses and flag collectors, and help that comes from within. The challenging regimen of 45 kilometres a day for two months is transcended by a growing spiritual bond with the landscape that keeps her moving forward.
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Footsteps in Bay de Verde A Mysterious Tale
Artist: Jenny DwyerPublisher: Running the Goat$21.95Evenings, Bridie and her brother and sister love to listen as the grownups tell stories; one stormy night those gathered hear the unmistakable footsteps of an absent friend. Has he come for one last tale?
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The Silence of the Vessel A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I want to be a nun.”
Elspeth, recently retired from Cape Breton University’s Celtic Culture Department, is not sure how to deal with her teenage daughter Cecelia’s outdated and strangely troubling post-secondary plans. Maybe the spiritual inclination Cecelia has would have been welcomed in the past, but with all the scandals the Catholic Church has been going through during recent decades, all Elspeth can do is wonder if it is too early in the day for a glass of wine before responding.
Cecelia has always been a quiet, sometimes even cold child, and Elspeth worries once again if she and Andrew had been too old to raise a menopausal baby. Now as Cecelia approaches high school graduation, and all the decisions that come with that transition, the gap between them seems to be more than merely an age thing.
As she tries to understand her strange desire to become a nun, Cecelia befriends an aging Sister at the Notre Dame congregation at the convent in Mabou. Madonna, a fitting name for a woman who lived a life devoted to God, is in a time of transition as well, struggling with ailments of an aging mind and body. Because of Cecelia’s interest, she tries to piece together the reasons she became a bride of Christ.
Faith, family, and fate bring these three women together. Cecelia is looking for hope in an increasingly fragile world but Madonna’s past, if she can face it, may challenge all of them.
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Boy With a Problem
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“…giant storytelling talent unleashed.” —Jon Tattrie, Atlantic Books Today
The daughter of an alcoholic desperate to be loved.
A father reliving a failed dream though his teenaged son.
A struggling immigrant surprised to discover that money does not buy happiness.
A creative boy struggling to please his dead father.
An eco-warrior defying her entire town for what she believes is right.
A father unable to reconcile the assault of his daughter with the world he raised her to believe in.
A gay pastor in self-imposed exile from church and family.
A stranger in a Santa suit dispensing fatherly advice.
A granddaughter who must end the life of the woman who raised her.
A survivor of a small-town drug addict determined to save her cousin from terrifying dreams.
An anxiety sufferer who finds refuge in sadomasochism.
A university student looking for love in all the wrong animal liberation schemes.In sharp, insightful prose, Boy With a Problem taps into the heart of our deeply human fear of failing to truly connect with others. The fissures that erupt between us, how quickly they widen from cracks to chasms—this is the thread running through these wise, raw, and tender stories.
