-
Nova Scotia Visions of the Future
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the summer of 2008, Pottersfield editor Lesley Choyce sent a letter to a select and varied list of Nova Scotians to contribute to a book about this province’s future. He invited some of the best minds (and hearts) around the province to present their vision of this possible province of the future.
Contributors would write about the environment, technology, immigration, social aspects, urban life, rural life, energy, politics, government, family, economics, forests, the ocean and much more. The bolder the vision, the better. Stories, personal opinions and controversial ideas were encouraged. Which future? Anything beyond ten years and up to a thousand.Â
The results of that request were varied, ambitious and surprising. This most insightful book may set in motion some serious action that can help Nova Scotia live up to its full future potential. The writing is personal, provocative, reflective, proactive, and thoroughly captivating by over forty contributors from many divers fields of expertise.Â
-
Cold Clear Morning (revised edition) New Revised Edition
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Taylor Colby grew up in the tiny Nova Scotia fishing village of Nickerson Harbour, but his guitar-playing skill led him to become a much sought-after studio musician in Los Angeles. Along with him went Laura, his childhood sweetheart and soulmate. In L.A., Laura becomes enamoured with the dark side of rock and roll life, leaving Taylor lost, distraught and deeply damaged. Taylor realizes he has to go back home to Nickerson Harbour, to confront Laura’s parents, to reunite with his father and to understand the truth of his own dysfunctional family.
Back in Nova Scotia, Taylor learns that his mother, who had abandoned him as a child, wants to come home to reconcile with her own past. Taylor is haunted by his loss and grief but must also come to terms with some hidden truths about Laura. As he begins to make sense of his past, he befriends an American feminist professor who is trying to start life anew in Canada with her troubled twelve-year-old son.
Cold Clear Morning is a novel about dreams realized and dreams shattered. It is about love and loss, hunting and healing, grief and forgiving. Taylor Colby speaks his story of what it takes to pick up the remains of a shattered life and find renewed purpose and hope. It is the story of going back to the home that you thought you could never return to. In his odyssey from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and back home, he attempts to find real meaning to his life of adventure and despair.
-
Saltwater Chronicles Notes on Everything Under the Nova Scotia Sun
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95This book celebrates the ordinary: the everyday disasters and discoveries that shape a life. In this, his one hundredth book, Lesley Choyce takes readers along as he writes about nearly everything under the sun from his home by the sea on the North Atlantic coast of Canada—all of it most ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.
-
Skunks for Breakfast
Artist: Brenda JonesPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$11.95Everyone knows there are no skunks in Nova Scotia…right? Well, that’s what Pamela thinks, until she wakes up one morning to a terrible smell.
Now Pamela stinks, her father stinks, her sister stinks, and her mother stinks. Soon her life stinks—her friends at school won’t come near her! And no matter how many skunks her father catches underneath the house, there always seems to be another.
Join Pamela and her family as they confront the odorous onslaught—and watch Pamela slowly start to like the unexpectedly cute creatures.
-
The Mi’kmaq Anthology
Editor: Rita JoePublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95A varied and spiritual collection of work by the Mi’kmaq writers of Atlantic Canada. Both young and old stories and storytellers combine talents to produce short stories, poetry, and personal essays.
-
Nova Scotia Love Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province’s most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound. This collection will convince any reader that love thrives and abides here on the wave-swept shores of Nova Scotia.
A young girl experiences profound attraction to the enigmatic but charismatic Manuel Jenkins in Budge Wilson’s tale; a child tells of having two mothers in Bruce Graham’s short story; and Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron each describe how they met and fell in love, bridging their lives from opposite coasts of Canada. Maureen Hull’s Miranda finds herself in a relationship with a rather unlikely partner; Jim Lotz and Lindsay Ruck tell of real-life love stories: deep, long-standing commitment between two kindred souls, through a lifetime of shared adventures.
There are other jewels here from Jon Tattrie, Steven Laffoley, Sheldon Currie, Harold Horwood, Carol Bruneau, Michael Ungar, William Kowalski, Don Aker, Chris Benjamin, and Lesley Choyce. Collectively, these writers explore many facets of this most human emotion.
-
Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea A Living History
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95“It is a good tale, well told, which opens the door to the wanderings of the imagination.” —The Globe and Mail
The history of Nova Scotia is an amazing story of a land and a people shaped by the waves, the tides, the wind, and the wonder of the North Atlantic. Choyce weaves the legacy of this unique coastal province, piecing together the stories written in the rocks, the wrecks, and the record books of human glory and error. In this newly revised sweeping true-life adventure, he provides a thoughtful down-to-earth journey through history that is both refreshing and revealing.
Here, well into the twenty-first century, he looks back at the full story of Nova Scotia from the geological history to the civilization of the Mi’kmaq, the arrival of the Europeans, and beyond to the stormy history of English and French. Choyce takes a critical look at the wars that helped shape the province, the scoundrels and the heroes who lived here down through the centuries, and the seas and storms that swept through the land of the Bluenosers. The original edition of Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea was published to acclaim by Penguin Books in 1996. This new edition brings the story up to date and looks at the changes in politics, economy, and global climate that will challenge Nova Scotians in the years ahead.
“Lesley Choyce’s writing captures the ebb and flow of Nova Scotia seafaring, from its Golden Age of Sail to the disasters and crimes at sea.” —The Halifax Chronicle Herald
-
The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson (3rd ed)
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Set on the East Coast, and focusing on 69-year-old Jonas, this novel reflects the title character’s energy, rage and humour as he looks upon his world, past and present, and is filled with memorable characters, adventures, and a pervading rugged gentleness.
-
McCurdy and the Silver Dart (New Edition)
Artist: Patsy MacAulay-MacKinnonPublisher: Cape Breton University Press$11.95McCurdy and the Silver Dart recounts the thrilling story of J. A. McCurdy, Canada’s aviation pioneer. Born in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Douglas McCurdy had a unique childhood during which he assisted world-famous scientist and inventor, Alexander Graham Bell in fascinating and frequently dangerous experiments conducted with kites and airplanes. He was the first person to fly an airplane in the British Empire. Later he became a barnstormer and daredevil pilot, taking part in some of the earliest air races. He was the first person to fly out of sight of land and the first pilot to receive a wireless message while airborne.
-
The Search for Heinrich Stief
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Heinrich and Regina Stief left their homeland in 1749 and settled in Pennsylvania. From there, they and a small band of fellow settlers migrated to the rough terrain around New Brunswick’s Peticodiac River. Faced with starvation, frigid winters, and abandonment by their sponsors-among them Benjamin Franklin-the settlers defied the odds by not only surviving but prospering. Steeves descendants now number upwards of 150,000 worldwide.
Heinrich’s tale has been told so many times that its parts have become legend. From the stories his earliest descendants told around the fire to the ones family historians have written and published since then, the facts surrounding Heinrich Stief, his roots, and his exploits have become confused, murky,and half remembered. Certain pieces of the puzzles has always eluded genealogists.
Recently, a Stief family descendant with a knack for research and more than his share of luck has uncovered a piece of history that is as significant as it was elusive. Here, then, is Heinrich Stief’s story, told as never before. -
Tighten the Traces
Publisher: Breton Books$12.95Celebrating over 500 performances worldwide, Breton Books is proud to offer Robbie O’Neill’s extraordinary play in book form, along with photographs and memories of the lead character, the beloved Leo Kennedy of Canso, Nova Scotia. A tribute to terrific storytelling, Tighten the Traces is first of all a good, enchanting read. Here is the voice of Leo Kennedy, whose outrageous humour and fierce persistence overcame cerebral palsy and a suspicious world, to win him a living as a door-to-door salesman in eastern Nova Scotia. You’ll split a gut laughing, with tears in your eyes. Performed from Guysborough schools to the London stage, in Scotland, Australia, the World Exposition in Vancouver and as a CBC Television Special, Tighten the Traces has earned high praise and an ACTRA Best Acting Award for its writer/actor, Robbie O’Neill.
-
A Day With You In Paradise
Artist: Patsy MacKinnonPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95This beautiful picture book depicts a family’s fun-filled day at a Prince Edward Island beach. Racing past dunes, building sand castles, and singing songs by a bonfire at night, the family revels in the peaceful beauty of an Island beach. Lennie Gallant’s lyrical description of a PEI summer day is matched perfectly with Patsy MacKinnon’s sun-soaked illustrations. A Day with You in Paradise is based on Lennie’s song of the same name from the Juno-nominated album When We Get There.
-
Discover Canada
$29.95The author, a gifted photographer, experienced in the last two years all of the adventures detailed in this book – travelling from coast to coast. Her goal is to show the possibilities and inspire. She receives 50,000 views per month on her website HikeBikeTravel.com. You can also try to keep up with her on Facebook or join her 10,000 Twitter followers for dynamic posts and photos @hikebiketravel.
-
Nature’s Yucky ! Gross Stuff that Helps Nature Work Gross Stuff that Helps Nature Work
Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing$10.00Nature’s Yucky uses kids’ natural fascination with the stinky, the gross, and the icky to help them learn more about wild animals and why critters behave as they do.
-
Lost Canoe
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95A contemporary account of tracking a historical explorer across Labrador.
In the mode of Leonidas Hubbard and William Cabot, Hesketh Prichard set out with a group of adventurers in the early 1900s, determined to cross Labrador. Disregarding local advice, his expedition headed up a box canyon and climbed five-hundred-metre cliffs all with a canoe in tow- a gruesome portage. The canoe was later abandoned.
The Lost Canoe is the account of the contemporary search for Prichard’s lost canoe. Over three summers Larry Coady coaxed friends and strangers into searching for Prichard’s
canoe, retracing Prichard’s route, verifying landforms and campsites, and mapping the entire trail. Only hard-nosed hikers immune to blackflies and mosquitoes were enticed to participate. Prichard’s original 1910 photographs and accounts of his journey, published in Through Trackless Labrador, are paired with Coady’s own photographs and writings. The narrative that results reveals a struggle against the elements to cross the ancient landscape of northern Labrador, a subarctic mix of boreal forest and open tundra. The book will appeal to a broad audience, from historians and geographers to adventurers and hikers. -
Historic Antigonish Town & County
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95Antigonish County is a rural community steeped in a unique heritage. Mi’kmaq have lived here for hundreds of years; they were joined in the eighteenth century by Acadians, Loyalists—including Black Loyalists—and settlers from New England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Historic Antigonish: Town and County bears witness, in photographs and detailed captions, to this cultural diversity and its many benefits. This is a book not about landscape or politics–although both have naturally affected life here–but about the countless individuals whose everyday lives shaped the area’s evolution, people like John Boyd, founder of the Casket; Lottie Melanson, champion sheepshearer; Alex MacDonald, the “Klondike King”; and Katie MacEachern, a gifted midwife. From the raising of St. Joseph’s Church to the fiery destruction and resurrection of Mount St. Bernard, local events, businesses, and, above all, people are captured and honoured in this wide-ranging tribute to Antigonish town and county.
-
Tokens of Grace
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Beginning in the 17th-century Scotland, when Covenanters met in open defiance of religious repression, open-air communions –the SÃ cramaid – evolved to become the social and spiritual highlight of the year. Primarily a mixture of prayer and religious and kinship feasting, open-air communions were an expression of core communal values and basic kin and religious loyalties.
Particularly between 1840 and 1890, but well into the 20th century as well, the sacramental season and its open-air communions was a dominant symbol in the lives of Cape Breton’s Scots Presbyterians. Whole communities, numbering in the thousands, converged for this great religious occasion, taking part in as many as five days of exhaustive preparatory self-examination.
-
Mi’kmaq Medicines (2nd edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95In this delightful book, Laurie Lacey’s reflections on the magical world of plant life and the gathering of remedies chronicles more than 70 plants used by the Mi’kmaq as medicines. Since the Mi’kmaq healing process begins with the gathering and preparation of medicines, Lacey takes us into swamps and bogs, the barrens and woods, to explore the habitats of plants with healing properties. He then illustrates each medicinal plant and describes its traditional use or uses. Whether one is hiking through a field listening for the sound of the “sacred plant,” the yellow rattle, exploring bogs in the hope of finding the elusive blue flag, or simply interested in the Mi’kmaq approach to health and healing, Mi’kmaq Medicines will prove a helpful and enjoyable companion.
This new edition includes a fully revised text and a new preface from the author on current perspectives in Mi’kmaq medicines.
-
Medicine Walk (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Medicine Walk explores the benefits of “special places,” and includes notes and exercises as aids to control stress, overcome fear, and foster the ability to concentrate and meditate. It opens up avenues of self-discovery and enables the reader to experience the natural, therapeutic value of the healing world of nature. Medicine Walk also includes a section on the spiritual nature of plants and their medicinal value.
-
Haunted Girl Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95In 1878 eighteen-year-old Esther Cox arrived in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to live with her sister’s family. Shortly after Esther moved in, the story goes, the house was plagued by unexplained occurrences–something (or someone) knocked on the walls, hid household items, moved furniture around, and set fires. Esther herself was subject to mysterious fevers, prodding and, on one occasion, stabbing. These occurrences followed her when she went to stay with other families in the area. Eventually she was charged with robbery and spent a month in jail, after which the haunting ceased.
Was Esther the victim of paranormal powers or the troubled mind behind a series of elaborate hoaxes? At the time of her alleged haunting, the plausibility of Esther Cox’s claims were hotly debated in newspapers and by fellow Amherst residents. In the hundred years since her death, Esther’s story has been retold numerous times and she remains to this day the town’s most famous historical figure.
Includes 30 photos of key locations in Amherst related to the story as well as Esther’s family members.
-
Cumberland County Facts and Folklore
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95Cumberland County is one of Nova Scotia’s oldest and largest counties and its personalities, history, geography, natural life, and legends are second to none. Its shores are touched by the majestic Bay of Fundy and the beautiful Northumberland Strait, its landscape was carved by glaciers, and its prehistoric climate created and preserved fossils that today are worthy of UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. From Amherst to Advocate, Minudie to Malagash, Port Howe to Port Greville, the beauty of its forests, crystal-clear lakes and rivers, and pastoral scenery are a delight for visitors and locals alike.
Discover this incredible part of Nova Scotia through amusing anecdotes, fun facts, and quirky trivia in Cumberland County Facts and Folklore
-
Found Drowned
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Based on a true unsolved crime from 1877, Laurie Glenn Norris’s debut novel tells the story of two small towns linked by the disappearance of a teenage girl. Mary Harney is a dreamy teenager in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, whose ambitions are stifled by her tyrannical grandmother and alcoholic father. When Mary’s mother becomes ill, an already fragile domestic situation quickly begins to unravel until the September evening when the girl goes missing.
Across the water on Prince Edward Island we meet Gilbert Bell, whose son finds a body washed up on the beach below the family farm. As the community is visited first by the local coroner and then by investigators, Glenn Norris paints a fascinating and darkly comic picture of judicial and forensic procedures of the time. At once tightly plotted and pensive, the novel travels back to the circumstances that led to Mary’s disappearance and then back further to the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, all the while building toward a raucous courtroom finale.
-
Here for the Music
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
-
My island’s the house I sleep in at night
Publisher: Island Studies Press$18.95“Being an Islander means that you aren’t like everyone else.” Bounded by water, you can live your life with certainty knowing where your edges are. Drawn from interviews with artists from Newfoundland and Tasmania, these poems capture what it means to be an islander. To know every rock and tickle, “the sea your road /the whole in the sky /your light to travel by. In My island’s the house I sleep in at night, Brinklow weaves stories and images with her own poetic imaginings.
-
Halfway Wild
Artist: Kevin BarryPublisher: Islandport Press$20.95On some days, there’s just not a good word for the way you feel. If your socks are sagging and your pants are wrinkled, what do you call it? Maybe you’re feeling like a turtle. Maybe you’re feeling halfway wild. Writer Laura Freudig describes those feelings in this poetic and playful picture book that connects children, not just to feelings and emotions, but also to animals and the quirks and patterns of the natural world. We follow a family throughout a day as they march through meadows like ants, dive to the depths like seals, play hide and seek like fireflies, and chatter like raccoons, until, at last, “when the house is still and all we can hear are the soft, slow breaths of the ones we love, we’re a family of bears.” Illustrator Kevin Barry blends the real with the fantastic in illustrations that will make young readers marvel, dream, and lean in for a closer look.
-
Historic Yarmouth
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Photography, perhaps more than any other medium, provides the most immediate and evocative window to our past. In Historic Yarmouth the unique historical features of this remarkable Nova Scotia town and surrounds are wonderfully presented in photographs taken between the mid-1800s and the early 14940s by photographers who lived and worked in the town itself.
Included here are streetscapes from Yarmouth and it country’s villages; scenes of special events; photographs of ships that made Yarmouth famous during the age of sail; changing modes of transportation; houses and buildings in which local folks lived and worked; and, of course, photographs of the townspeople themselves.
All the photographs presented here, and thousands more, are apart of the Yarmouth’s extraordinary past. This book is a tribute to the people of Yarmouth whose foresight and support have contributed so much posterity.
-
Bitter, Sweet
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$10.95Pru Burbidge lives a simple life on the family homestead on Dalhousie Road in 1940s rural Nova Scotia- until her father abandons the family and her mother falls ill. Her life is turned upside-down by these events, and she is forced to take on the role of primary caregiver to her siblings, Jessie, Flora, and Davey. Things go from bad to worse when Pru’s mother dies, leaving Pru and Jessie, her older brother, to care for the family in secret so they are not separated and sent away to foster homes, or worse- the orphan house. Pru and Jessie do everything they can to hide the fact that their mother has passed away and keep the family together, but their situation becomes increasingly dire as their money and food supplies begin to run out and their neighbours start getting suspicious. When the situation comes to a head and they are on the verge of being found out, Pru and her siblings must work together to save their family from being torn apart.
-
Flying With a Broken Wing
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Cammie Deveau began life with a few strikes against her. She’s visually impaired, abandoned by her mother at birth, her father was a casualty of the Second World War—and if all that isn’t enough, she’s being raised by her bootlegging aunt. No wonder she dreams of starting a brand new life.
When Cammie learns about a school for blind and visually impaired children she becomes convinced a new life is waiting for her in Halifax, but how will she ever convince her aunt to let her go? With the help of her best friend, they devise a plan to blow up the local moonshiner’s still. But Cammie has not managed to change her luck, and things get worse than she ever imagined.
-
Cammie Takes Flight
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Eleven-year-old Cammie Turple grew up with more obstacles than most. Visually impaired and abandoned by her parents, she was raised by her tenacious, bootlegging aunt in rural Tanner, Nova Scotia. After Cammie and her best friend, Evelyn Merry, destroy the local moonshine still, forcing Evelyn’s abusive, alcoholic father to sober up but nearly killing Evelyn in the process, Cammie convinces her aunt to send her to the Halifax School for the Blind.
The anticipated follow-up to Flying with a Broken Wing, Cammie Takes Flight finds Cammie navigating life at her new school, armed with an envelope with her estranged mother’s address on it. Unsure if she can trust her new friend, Nessa, Cammie enlists her help in tracking to help track her mother down. Will Cammie finally learn why she was abandoned and be able to start her new life? Or will she find too many secrets to count, and realize that she might never put the past behind her?
A heartfelt coming-of-age story, Cammie Takes Flight explores the values of perseverance, unlikely friendships, and what it means to be a family.
-
-
Good Mothers Don’t
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95It’s 1960 and Elizabeth is slowly coming apart. Her reality is splintering and she wants to harm her children. Fifteen years later, Elizabeth is desperately trying to fill in the gaps electric shock therapy has left in her memory. She longs to find her children and explain that she never meant to leave for so long. A moving exploration of illness, memory, and how we fight for who we love.
-
The Family Way
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$14.95Tulia May lives in rural Nova Scotia with her mother, who works in the laundry of the nearby Ideal Maternity Home. It’s a place where unwed mothers can discreetly give birth, a place where adoptions by rich Americans can be quickly arranged. Tulia doesn’t think about the workings of the home much; mostly she hates being roped in to helping scrub the endless diapers. Her friend Finny Paul has suspicions that the home is holding sinister secrets—the worst being that unadoptable babies are being buried in butterboxes—but Tulia thinks he’s being ridiculous. When Tulia’s sister Becky ends up in the home, Tulia truly starts to consider Finny’s concerns. And when she and Finny discover what’s really going on there, she knows she has to act quickly to keep Becky’s baby safe.
Based on the true story of the Ideal Maternity Home, and its tragic Butterbox Babies, The Family Way is a thoughtful and engaging exploration of family and of Nova Scotia’s history. A stand-alone middle-grade novel, it also serves as a prequel to the critically acclaimed Cammie novels, Flying With a Broken Wing and Cammie Takes Flight.
