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In this provocative essay, David Adams Richards brings together his ideas about writing -- how great works of literature are created, the writer's essential position as an outsider, and the difficulties writers experience in the pursuit of personal truth. The quest for truth always comes with a price, says Richards, but it also results in freedom for writers and their characters, and sometimes results in great works of literature. Says Richards, "What I say to young writers is never fear that you too will be evaluated most harshly in your life for telling the truth.

Shortlisted, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction AwardWarm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history.

In 1942, RAF flight controller Robert Wyse became a Japanese prisoner of war on the island of Java in Indonesia. Starved, sick, beaten, and worked to near-death, he wasted away until he weighed only seventy pounds, his life hanging in tenuous balance. There were strict orders against POWs keeping diaries, but Wyse penned his observations on the scarce bits of paper he could find, struggling to describe the brutalities he witnessed. After cleverly hiding his notes in a piece of bamboo next to his bed, in December of 1943, he carefully hid his notes inside a bottle beneath his prison hut.

Don Messer was more than a household name in Canada — he was part of family life, the background music in Canadian kitchens — first on radio, and then on television. Private and unassuming, Don was everyman, and yet someone singular and special: a devoted family man, a rigid Calvinist, band diplomat, lover of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a musical prodigy who from the age of seven knew and played directly to an audience . . . an audience that eventually protested in unprecedented numbers on Parliament Hill upon CBC’s sudden cancellation of his show, Don Messer’s Jubilee.

Winner, Evelyn Richardson Memorial Prize for Non-FictionWell-known naturalist and artist Linda Johns shares her woodland home with a menagerie of injured wild birds — starlings, blue jays, pigeons, baby woodpeckers, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a semi-palmated sandpiper, and even a gannet. She and her “saner half,” Mack, have gone so far as to transform their living room into an indoor forest, complete with two dead trees providing a variety of perches and a screened porch making do as a practise flyway.

Stories shape the world, imposing order on chaos, and the stories we tell declare: I exist. Neil Bissoondath presses these assertions about narrative further. Stories are also, he says, forms of confession. Each time we tell a story, we reveal a little about our experiences, dreams, fears, desires, and fantasies. Unlike governments, which try to control and simplify narrative, fiction writers use narrative expansively, for exploration and discovery. Questions are numerous; answers are rare.

At 2:21 am on September 8, 1896, authorities in Nova Scotia killed an innocent man. Peter Wheeler — a "coloured" man accused of murdering a white girl — was strung up under a porch with a slipknot noose. The hanging was state-sanctioned but it was a lynching all the same. Now, a re-examination of his case using modern forensic science reveals one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Canadian history. On the night of January 27, 1896, 14-year-old Annie Kempton found herself home alone in the picturesque village of Bear River, Nova Scotia. She did not live to see the morning.

Lorna Drew thought her partner was carrying his absent-minded professor status too far, until, two years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease. A thoughtful memoir and a wide-ranging handbook, Different Minds is an illuminating side-by-side account of life with Alzheimer Disease. Prepared with the assistance of the Alzheimer Society of New Brunswick, it offers practical advice on everything from reorganizing finances to dealing with emotions.

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother . . . or was she? This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside “The A,” the infamous Agapemone,* named for the Greek word meaning Abode of Love. It was a religious cult founded in mid-19th century England by a defrocked clergyman who claimed to be guided personally by the Holy Ghost.

William Shakespeare lived at a time when the medieval world — a world of magic, astrology, witchcraft, and superstition of all kinds — was just beginning to give way to more modern ways of thinking. Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, and new ideas about the human body, the earth, and the universe at large were just starting to transform Western thought.