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Hare B&B
Artist: Bill PechetPublisher: Running the Goat$22.95Harriet and her seven young siblings are left orphans when their parents run afoul of a cunning coyote. They open their home as a “hare bed and breakfast” for paying guests, and when the coyote returns to the scene of the crime, they serve her her comeuppance for breakfast.
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Working from Home for a Harmonious Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Since Luc Desroches began working from his home office in 2016, he has been writing about how the move has allowed him to create a more harmonious life for both himself and his family. This book was mostly written pre-COVID-19, when working from home was more the exception than the rule. With almost every employee on the planet being encouraged to work from home where possible, COVID-19 has made the necessary transition from office to home more important than ever. Although there’s an explosion of teleworking articles with best practice tips, the author delves much deeper into the personal experience as he reflects on the values and teachings of the Mi’kmaq people who have worked from their homes for over ten thousand years.
The deeper messages of the book are perennial, which is what we need as we face unprecedented challenges. Now is an opportunity for millions of people to make a more informed decision on whether they should continue working from home or return to their pre-COVID workplaces. Now is a potential tipping point that could lead to a happier and healthier life for the individual and for society as a whole.
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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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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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Louisbourg or Bust A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95A rickety surf rig on wheels. A guide named Don Quixote. No cellphone. Louisbourg or Bust is RC Shaw’s spandex-free pilgrimage up a haunted coastline. Fuelled by Hungry Man Stew and blind optimism, Shaw battles potholed hills and remote waves en route to the Fortress of Louisbourg.
With a Nova Scotia road map in one hand and a fat copy of Don Quixote in the other, Shaw hatches a plan. He builds The Rig, a Frankenstein-inspired bicycle-plus-trailer to haul his camping gear and surf stuff. Then he circles Louisbourg with a black Sharpie and vows to take the fortress back from its malevolent tourist occupiers. Finally, on a clear June morning, he kisses his family goodbye and creaks off down the road in search of adventure for adventure’s sake. No cellphone, no safety net. Just the restless pulse of the Atlantic Ocean as it rips and tears at the coastline of the Eastern Shore.
As the lark gets real, Shaw is forever changed by the gnarly soul of Nova Scotia’s fogbound, fading coastline.
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It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Ten Years of Misadventures in Coffee
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Annabel’s coffee adventures took her from a wet, dreary market in northern England to the Canadian Prairies via a PhD in Central America. She gradually mastered the art of juggling a start-up business, her thesis, and a five-month-old baby at the same time, and negotiated emigration bureaucracy, a few disastrous business relationships, and the brutality of Canadian winters. This is the real story of coffee entrepreneurship, with all the grim, impossible, frustrating, and messy bits left in. Because they all seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Salt Fires
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Salt Fires is a volume of poems that embrace and reflect our human consciousness: our awareness, our blindness, our Shadow, our mythologies. They invite us to look at ourselves in ways that often are disconcerting, sometimes startling. Love of land infuses Salt Fires. Intimately inhabited and passionately shared, Nova Scotia’s farms, woods, and shores reveal themselves to be our Earth in microcosm.
A suite of Sable Island poems closes the book and affirms this notion—Sable Island, a strip of sand in a vast ocean, impossible, yet somehow here, like our planet, rich in life and beauty. This is the work of a mature poet who examines moral blindness and human frailties by inhabiting the experiences of the poems’ speakers with vulnerability and honesty. Accessible, clear, and alive with music, the poems inform and incite.
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From Palette to Palate Culinary Artworks from the Digby Pines Kitchen
Artist: Lynda ShalaganPublisher: SSP Publications$15.95Chef Dale Nichols and artist Lynda Shalagan have collaborated to create a mouth-watering and eye-opening masterpiece — the finest dishes the venerable Pines has to offer. Yes, there are scallops but so much more — for the vegetarian, the holistic and the environmentally responsible.
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Gabriella’s Kitchen
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95When Gabriella first saw the Greek island of Corfu, “it was simply paradise”—except that there were no good restaurants. So she and her sociable Greek husband rented a charming old Venetian villa and opened their own. Here, Gabriella developed her own special recipes and catering to the rich and famous who increasingly found their way to her door (Julian Huxley, Paul McCartney, and Albert Finney, to name a few). In this bright, practical, and unusual cookbook, Gabriella shares her original recipe. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging stories of people and events that coloured and enriched her life.
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Wildflower
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95You cannot own a wildflower.
An old woman’s wish for a child is granted in the form of a thumb-sized girl born inside a flower. Though the child brings the woman much joy, Wildflower cannot be planted in one place; she must go where the wild wind blows. And if her mother really loves her, she must let her go.
In Wildflower, artist Briana Corr Scott (The Book of Selkie) brings her whimsical illustrations and gentle poetry to the beloved Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “Thumbelina.” Maintaining the original spirit of Andersen’s tale, celebrating love between mother and child, kinship between humans and animals, and bravery—no matter your size or shape—this refreshing retelling gives newfound agency to Wildflower, and offers young readers a tender lesson about the importance of respecting nature.
Wildflower is the perfect gift for new mothers and mothers-to-be, recent graduates, and anyone with a love and appreciation for nature.
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Seaside Lullaby
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$14.95A soothing board book that helps baby learn to count from 1 to 10, with vibrant illustrations of seaside fauna and flora, and gentle, rhyming refrains. From the celebrated creator of Mermaid Lullaby and Wildflower, this is the perfect bedtime read.
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Marilla Before Anne
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Marilla Cuthbert was fifty-two years old when the plucky red-headed Anne Shirley came to live with her and her brother, Matthew, at Green Gables farm on Prince Edward Island. A seemingly cold and dour spinster, her heart eventually softens to the loveable orphan girl. But for over a century readers have wondered, who was Marilla before Anne?
In Louise Michalos’s remarkable debut novel, readers are introduced to a spirited eighteen-year-old Marilla Cuthbert—a girl not unlike Anne herself—who is desperately in love, and whose whole life is spread before her. But when a moment of defiance brings life-changing consequences, a new Marilla begins to take shape, one who would learn to bear tragedy like a birthright, and loss as an inevitability, and who would hold steadfast to the secrets that could shatter the lives of everyone around her.
Weaving its way from Marilla’s early life in Avonlea to her coming-of-age in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and back, Marilla Before Anne is the story readers of Anne of Green Gables have longed for. Told with a refreshingly original East Coast voice, this exquisite, heartbreaking work of historical fiction takes readers on a journey back in time, to the Green Gables where Marilla Cuthbert lived, loved, and learned, long before Anne.
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The Last Time I Saw Her
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95It’s been almost a year since Charlotte Romer set foot in her hometown of River John, Nova Scotia. She’s been living at a boarding school hours away, safe from the trauma and broken relationships she left behind. All she has left in the small town is her older brother, Sean, who is struggling to keep the lights on in their run-down family home. Charlotte hasn’t spoken to her best friend, Sophie, since the night she fled. It’s not exactly a celebratory homecoming.
On her first night home, Charlotte shows up unannounced to Sophie’s eighteenth birthday party. The trickle-down effects of that decision haunt Charlotte for weeks. But when Charlotte reconnects with Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, Max, the two of them begin to slowly unravel what happened the night of the accident the summer before—the night that changed everything. Somebody knows something, and that somebody really doesn’t want Charlotte and Max to figure it out.
With a fast-paced, high-stakes plot, Alexandra Harrington’s debut YA novel will leave readers breathless until the final, shocking conclusion.
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Évangéline The Many Identities of a Literary Icon
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$34.95Sociologist Joseph Yvon Thériault presents three versions of the literary heroine: Évangéline the Acadian, Évangéline the Canadian, and Évangéline the American. Can these three distinct identities be merged, and will survive the effects of globalization?
CBC most anticipated non-fiction of Spring 2021
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Rhode Island 101
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$14.95From Narragansett Bay, Roger Williams, the American Industrial Revolution and the Independent Man to the New England mob, the Big Blue Bug, the Newport Mansions, Family Guy and profiles of Buddy Cianci, H.P. Lovecraft and the Farrelly brothers, no book provides a more insightful lowdown on the Ocean State than Rhode Island 101. No book is more fun!
Well known Rhode Islanders weigh in on the nation?s smallest state. Investigative reporter Jim Taricani recounts his top stories, Mark Patinkin provides signs that you’ve been in Rhode Island too long, meteorologist John Ghiorse revisits the most memorable weather events of the last 40 years, Lincoln Chafee offers a Rhode Island treasure hunt and Rory Raven illuminates haunted Rhode Island.
From fabulous beaches, historic cities, and dynamite cuisine to corrupt politicians, elite universities and a unique accent and slang, it?s all here.
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Here and There
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Inspired by the places, people and sounds around his home town of Morell, Prince Edward Island, Roderick MacDonald pens lycrical poetry that nourishes his reflective nature. Especially inspired by the shore line, MacDonald evokes feelings and memories of Island days spent whiling away at the beach, breathing in the salty air and listening to the sound of the waves. He also writes evocatively about many aspects of the Island way of life throughout the seasons, from a rainy, spring day to a the experience of sharing pint of beer with a friend. The poetry of MacDonald’s collection Here and There will resonate with both Islanders and people who love P.E.I. It is the perfect companion to any bedside.
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Broken Crayons
Artist: Marla LesagePublisher: Acorn Press$14.95When Ms. Gillis, a preservice teacher on Prince Edward Island, decides to complete her International Teaching Practicum in Kenya, sponsored by Farmers Helping Farmers, she is very excited. She can’t wait to start her adventure in the warm African sun, leaving behind cold February days in Canada and (as she comes to learn) a well-stocked Island classroom. She is eager to share her newly-acquired teaching skills with the children in Kenya. She arrives laden with gifts and school supplies from friends on PEI. As she distributes a gift of crayons to her students, she soon realizes that she is the one who has the most to learn. Broken Crayons is a delightful story written for school age children. It is based on a true story that never grows old and one which carries a message for all, no matter your age.
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The Great Saskatchewan Joke Book
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$14.95If you like a good joke (and we all know you do), then you’ll get a kick out of this hilarious collection that pokes fun at all things Saskatchewan. With zingers that will tickle your funny bone, these good-natured jabs are just funny enough that they will leave you rolling in the aisles.
The Great Saskatchewan Joke Book will literally make you laugh out loud. Joel Jeffrey believes that if you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at?
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Vintage Moncton A History in Pictures
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$29.95In 2012, Ryan Gagné found a photo of the pink subway and posted it to his personal Facebook page. In less than an hour, he had more than 100 likes. He was floored by the interest and wanted the photo to reach more people, and the Vintage Moncton Facebook page was born. Today it has more than 17,000 followers.
So, do you remember the pink subway? Do you remember the UFO pizza shop or the ridiculously narrow Gunningsville bridge? With more than 140 photos—many of them seen here for the first time—Vintage Moncton: A History in Pictures offers a one-of-a-kind portrait of the Hub City.
Vintage Moncton: A History in Pictures provides a look back at just how much the city has changed over the years.
