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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.
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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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One Strong Girl
$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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The Tides of Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Set in northeastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons paints vivid portraits of contemporary labourers whose harvests mark the rhythms of the seasonal year. Each of the twelve monthly chapters tells the story of a labour unique to that month, including jobs like tuna fishing, cranberry farming, maple syrup production, sheep farming, beekeeping, lobster fishing, and foraging for wild mushrooms. Stewart revitalizes an older, contemplative view of the sacredness of time. In keeping with the genre of nature writing, her book offers a meticulous way of looking at the world as she blends first-hand observations of seasonal change with stories of the labourers. The Tides of Time offers a refuge from the rush of urban life. It turns to the seasons, rural life and literature for an alternative mode of time, which is fluid, rhythmic, and gentle. The symplicity is there—close at hand.
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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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Halifax and Me
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In 1971, Harry Bruce, recognized as one of Canada’s top non-fiction writers, lost his mind—according to his peers—when he left bustling, lucrative Toronto and moved his family to the tough little seaport of Halifax.
Harry was already acquainted with Halifax; at eighteen, he lived at HMCS Stadacona as an officer-cadet in the Royal Canadian Navy. He joined the navy chiefly to lose his virginity. “For what finer way could there be to serve queen and country?” Though he did not achieve his goal, that summer gave him his first whiffs of the port whose magnetism he would one day find irresistible.
He settled in Halifax—and he moved away. Several times, in fact, even going as far as Vancouver. Yet he kept returning to Halifax. Each time he found it had changed for the better and was a little less like the “racist, boring, City of the Living Dead” that comedian Cathy Jones called it forty years ago, and a little more like the lively, welcoming, cosmopolitan town he hoped it would be.
For the past fifty years, Harry Bruce has been working as what The Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature calls “an impassioned advocate for the Maritimes and an essayist of great charm and perception.” Here, writing more charmingly and perceptively than ever, he celebrates the blossoming of Halifax as “A City to Dance In.”
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Daring, Devious and Deadly True Tales of Crime and Justice from Nova Scotia’s Past
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Welcome to a rogues’ gallery of murderers and pirates, a pair of brazen bank robbers and a fraud artist who fooled Halifax’s elite. A supporting cast includes a wise-cracking Cape Breton judge, legendary journalist-turned-politician Joseph Howe, circus showman P.T. Barnum, and future prime minister John Thompson. Daring, Devious and Deadly is a collection of fifteen true tales of crime and justice that spans more than 150 years of Nova Scotia’s history, from a triple murder in 1791 at a farm near Lunenburg to 1947, when Angus Walters, skipper of the racing schooner Bluenose, was attacked in the pages of an American magazine.
The stories are drawn from communities across the province, from Sydney and Amherst to Halifax, from the rugged coast of the Eastern Shore to the historic town of Annapolis Royal. Filled with surprising twists and courtroom drama, these stories of greed, murder and vengeance offer a window on the past. But justice can be far from blind. Religious hatred, partisan rivalry, social status, ethnicity, or political corruption sometimes invaded the courtroom, threatening to upset the delicate balance between guilt and innocence. Was justice done in each of these cases? You be the judge.
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The Ferryland Visitor
Artist: Gerald L. SquiresPublisher: Running the Goat$21.95When she moves into an abandoned lighthouse-keeper’s house with her family, Esther is excited by her new surroundings. One day the former constable comes to welcome her family to their new home. But just who is this mysterious man?
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Mean Streets In Search of Forgotten Halifax, 1953-1967
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Following the Second World War, a new generation of politicians and planners across North America set out to reimagine their cities. With great verve and vision, they conceived of brave new urban landscapes filled with elevated highways, modern housing, thriving businesses, and engaging public spaces. All it would take, they said, was a deep collective capacity to dream and a determined willingness to wipe away the past.
And the idea caught on.
With great enthusiasm, these politicians and planners set out to realize their grand vision. They proposed that cities tear down great swaths of their aged, derelict, and decaying homes; destroy antiquated, dilapidated buildings; and tear up sordid streets in an effort they called “slum clearance.” Of course, these “slums” were also communities often populated by the most vulnerable members of the city, the desperately poor and people of colour, those who had little power to make their own decisions and determine their own fate. The whole process was called urban renewal.
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Teaching at the Top of the World
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This memoir is a love story of sorts that expresses great respect for Inuit people, their culture, and the magnificent Arctic landscape. It is told from the perspective of a non-Inuit woman, who has lived and worked within an isolated, cross-cultural environment. Odette and YoAnne learned quickly that to be successful northern teachers, you must enter into the lives of your students and their rich culture in meaningful and significant ways. Outside of their regular school day, they enthusiastically participated in community activities; they ate Northern foods; they snowmobiled out onto the land to take part in camping, fishing, and hunting activities; and they learned as much Inuktitut language as they could. In turn, the author and her partner were warmly welcomed and they were deeply touched by their complete acceptance as a lesbian couple in these remote places.
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Green Ghost, Blue Ocean No Fixed Address
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a travel memoir about a 40,000 nautical mile adventure that spans seventeen years. Early in their careers, Jennifer and her husband Nik come to realize that the rewards in the corporate world will always be the same—more money to buy more things, but never time off for self-discovery. When they begin to imagine a life outside the norm, they seize on the idea of long-distance sailing as the perfect way to journey down a road less travelled.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a story about taking time and taking a risk, about unwittingly losing your identity while simultaneously redefining yourself in ways never imagined. It is a story about the importance of starting and the acceptance of an imperfect plan. It is a tale of the triumph of conviction: if you believe that you?ll figure it out when you get there, it?s amazing how far you can go.
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Memoir Conversations and Craft
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Memoir opens doors we could never ordinarily walk through—into the lives of Olympians, queens, victims of war and other tragedies, teenage rock stars, former streetwalkers or geishas—along with the doors to the lives of extraordinary/ordinary people. The best memoirs are maps of the heart and mind, and Marjorie Simmins invites you to explore the map of your own life. Here are the probing questions and dynamic writing ideas, coupled with inspirational interviews with best-selling memoirists, to light your own imagination afire. How do you access the details of your earliest memories, make them immediate and dramatic? How do you drive the story forward? How do you make a stranger care about your life?
Memoir: Conversations and Craft is intended for any reader or writer who is fascinated by the renegade memoir form—personal life stories that demand to be read, refuse to be forgotten. Whether you wish to compile memories from childhood to share with grandchildren, or whether you burn with the makings of a literary memoir, this reflection on writing can galvanize you.
Donna Morrissey, Linden MacIntyre, Plum Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Edmund Metatawabin, Diane Schoemperlen, and Claire Mowat—some of Canada’s top fiction and non-fiction writers—speak with candour, humour, and compassion about their journeys to memoir. Often touching, always helpful and frank, the interviews cover a broad spectrum of the writing experience. The time to write a memoir is always now—and the benefits are transformative.
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Threads in the Acadian Fabric Nine Generations of an Acadian Family
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Threads in the Acadian Fabric tells the story of the author’s paternal family, her line of ancestors that stretches back nine generations to the first Poirier who arrived from France and settled in Port Royal in the 1640s.
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Halifax Nocturne A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95December 1954: the old city in winter wears its two hundred years of grime and vice without any shame. The paint peels from ramshackle homes, and the streets congeal with snow and mud. Weary pedestrians trudge through the bleakness with chins tucked below the collars of threadbare coats. Nothing comes easy to the old city, and nothing ever changes — too many tangled secrets and too many unspoken debts. And yet a new suspension bridge, being built out over the harbour to Dartmouth and set to open in the spring, promises a better tomorrow. Such promised are not easy to keep.
On the street, hard-drinking Halifax police detective Ray Vargas has an unfailing habit for finding trouble, and when a man is found shot to death in the back of a Chevy truck, Vargas finds more trouble than he can handle — the murdered man is his oldest friend and the husband of his lover.
Frank’s death reminds Ray of an unspoken debt left unpaid. He sets off to find a killer in a city that doesn’t much want a killer to be found. At every turn, he encounters lies and danger. With his partner Artie Brennan and friends Ezekiel Dixon and jazz great Louis Armstrong, Ray tries to make sense of the deepening mystery, but hope is hard to come by — at least until he meets Lee White, Frank’s one-time assistant, who might just be his own bridge to a better tomorrow.
Nothing in Halifax is what it seems. As the tension builds, and the stakes grow higher, Ray knows that his own future with Lee depends on his solving the mystery. But to do that, he must make a difficult choice: cross a bridge — or burn it.
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Silver Linings Stories of Gratitude, Resiliency and Growth Through Adversity
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Silver Linings author Janice Landry asks the very tough question, “What are you the most grateful for?” to fifteen inspiring Canadians from five provinces and two esteemed guests from the United States. One of seventeen is Dr. Bob Emmons, considered to be the world’s pre-eminent expert in the study of gratitude.
Gratitude and resiliency are key cornerstones in the field of mental health. Science-based evidence, discussed by Dr. Emmons and others, underlines the importance of developing and practising gratitude. Research proves being grateful is good for us, both mentally and physically. Gratitude can improve our resiliency before challenges occur in our lives, which they inevitably do.
Let’s face it: it’s easy to be grateful when things are running smoothly. The people in Silver Linings have discovered that gifts may actually emerge from life’s toughest challenges. Landry’s own gratitude practice was shaken to its core when both her mother and a close friend, assisted-death advocate Audrey Parker, died within weeks of one another while she was writing Silver Linings.
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As British as the King Lunenburg County During the First World War
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The Great War comes to Lunenburg County in this gripping and detailed historical account from award-winning author Gerald Hallowell. In 1914, Germans in Lunenburg County, despite deep roots, faced suspicion as Canada waged war with Germany. Hallowell’s meticulous research breathes life into the World War I home front, in a time of blackouts, rumours of spies and naval skirmishes.
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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.
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Are You Kidding Me?! Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95For the first time, sixteen years’ worth of Cape Bretoner Lesley Crewe’s finest newspaper columns are collected in one place. The bestselling novelist, columnist and humorist employs a sharp, versatile wit, anchored by a tender centre, to bring readers laughter and tears. Crewe celebrates life, and all its warts, in this side-splitting, heartwarming collection.
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Father Greg – A Life The Cabbage Patch Priest
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95Cape Breton’s renowned social activist and priest comes alive in this warm, personal biography. Crafted from Greg MacLeod’s diaries and letters, plus Doucet’s years as his traveling companion, Father Greg displays the incredible range and vigour of MacLeod’s ideas and their down-to-earth application. Through his daring range of proposals, Fr. Greg relentlessly advocated for the public good. Includes a terrific batch of photographs.
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The Kinfolk
Publisher: Islandport Press$21.95In the final installment of The Five Stones Trilogy, Chase, Evelyn, and Knox must fight to save not just the island of Ayda but their own world. The three young people are scattered throughout the war-torn island as Dankar, the power hungry ruler of Exor, mounts his greatest attack. His forces begin a final, fatal siege on the weakening realms of Melor and Metria. His goal: to extend his power beyond Ayda, beyond the fog, to the rest of the world. Will Chase be able to convince Ratha, the proud ruler of the realm of Varuna, to come to their aid? Can Evelyn learn to harness her daylights and control the stone of Metria? Will Dankar murder his own cousin in his bid for power? And if the Fifth Stone returns to Ayda, will its power save or destroy it? G.A. Morgan, who “excels at worldbuilding” (School Library Journal), introduced us to Ayda in The Fog of Forgetting and raised the stakes in Chantarelle. Now she brings the trilogy to a thrilling conclusion with a profound investigation: What does it take to continue believing in one another when almost every hope is gone?
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Grandfather’s House Returning to Cape Breton
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Grandfather’s House is Clive Doucet’s follow-up to My Grandfather’s Cape Breton, published in 1980 and continuously in print. Now a grandfather himself, Doucet muses about this role. While he believed as a child that to be a grandfather was to own a farm by the sea, he now realizes that his job as a grandfather is to tell stories. In doing so, he traces the history of the Doucets back to Acadie, then to the early years of the Cape Breton village of Grand Étang and to modern-day Ottawa.
Doucet’s musings are interspersed with poetry, short stories, and with summer adventures with his grandchildren in Grand Étang. He paints a loving portrait of his grandfather’s village and the people, past and present, who make it a vibrant community. The themes of resilience and rejuvenation permeate the memoir, which is both rooted in nostalgia and filled with hope for a more sustainable future.
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Purple for Sky
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Mayhem unfolds and loyalties unravel in a tightly knit clan of Bible-thumping shopkeepers when the formidable Ruby Clarke develops dementia, and a secret is revealed about her mother that shatters ties binding Ruby’s niece, Lindy Hammond, to the failing family business. Set in a shrinking community in northern Nova Scotia—a town that a century ago was an industrial hub—this unforgettable novel interweaves the lives of three women from three generations and of the husbands, lovers, and customers who cross them. Past and present come to life in this rich, award-winning story that blends humour and grit, realism and the magic of everyday things, as colourful as the crazy quilt cherished by its characters.
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Around the Province in 88 Days One Woman, Two Pairs of Sneakers and 3000 Kilometers of Nova Scotia Coastline
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Early on a May morning, a young Nova Scotia woman straps on a small backpack and leaves the Halifax Common to start her journey along the coastal roads of Nova Scotia. Planning to cover almost a marathon a day, she will walk the perimeter of the entire province in just under three months to raise awareness for the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Brigadoon Children’s Camp Society. She billets with locals each night and meets countless Nova Scotians who come out to walk with her, support her project, and tell their stories.
Along the way, fellow walkers share family folklore, tales of buried gold, lost fingers, and detailed instructions on how to catch a beaver by the tail. “We don’t wear make-up and we don’t dust,” explains one of the women Emily meets near Sable River, when asked how she found the time to rebuild the trails in her area and win the Community Spirit Award. Struggling with blisters, fatigue, and an encounter with a bear cub, Emily walks on, overwhelmed by the generosity of her hosts in each community and by the stunning coastal views at every turn. Around the Province in 88 Days details Emily’s beautiful and quirky experiences on the road as she develops an intimate connection with the province and its people, unsuspecting of the vast changes the trip will eventually set in motion in her own life.
Emily Taylor Smith has walked the perimeters of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, the coastlines of New Brunswick and the Gaspé Peninsula, and also completed a 100-kilometre walk from Halifax to Truro in nineteen hours. Born in Salisbury, New Brunswick, she moved to Nova Scotia to study theatre at Acadia University, and perform with the Atlantic Theatre Festival. She is the founder Local Tasting Tours, a culinary walking tour in Halifax. She currently lives in Dartmouth with her husband, their poodle Woody and Wilson the cat.
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Westray
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Vernon Theriault was off shift when the Westray mine exploded in 1992, killing twenty-six men in Plymouth, Nova Scotia. Theriault took part in the perilous rescue operation that followed. As the magnitude of Westray took hold, Theriault found himself struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares. When he tried to re-educate himself for another line of work, he discovered that he was both illiterate and dyslexic. Theriault found new purpose when he became part of a labour movement that successfully lobbied the federal government to bring in a worker-safety law that became known as the Westray Bill.
Theriault openly discusses his complicated journey in this straightforward, simply written memoir, which begins with the promise of a good job with good pay at Westray.
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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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Where Duty Lies A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Frank Grimmer did not set out to earn honours on the field of battle nor did he readily choose to go to war. World powers were shifting. The future of nations was deemed dependant on their armies. It was left to the young men to face the gunfire of other young men who could have been friends under the right circumstances and in times of peace. Where Duty Lies tells the story of how a 23-year-old St. Andrews, New Brunswick, man ended up in the quicksand-like mud of Passchendaele labouring under heavy artillery fire helping construct supply lines that supported the Canadian advance during the Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the most horrific in a war of horrific battles.
