National Network for Equitable Library Service

A teenager in the 1970s, Gwen is stuck in a tuberculosis sanatorium with only her journal and the odd cigarette to keep her sane. Her twisted sense of humour helps her deal with invasive medical procedures, oversensitive friends, and dictatorial nurses, but nothing can spring her from prison. Gwen is haunted by the dark and violent turn her life took prior to getting sick. With her family shattered, Gwen is fighting hard--with all the stubbornness and humour she can muster--not to be shattered too.

Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn't trade her life for anything, but at thirty she's starting to feel like something's missing. Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie's doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie's peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined. Lesley Crewe's funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton style humour.

A Nova Scotia classic, The Nymph and the Lamp is the story of Isabel Jardin, a strong and sensitive woman, and the men in her life--the stoic Matthew Carney, a living legend, the passionate Gregory Skane, and the innocent but infatuated Jim Sargent. Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of Marina, a wind-swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia, as the characters come to terms with their personal contradictions and the demands of isolated island life.

It's 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony makes his living as a house painter by day before catapulting loads of Canadian weed across the river to Detroit by night. Then he meets Kate Chan, a beautiful, street-smart law student, who calls his bluff and picks apart his personal mythology. Ultimately she presents him with his own hard choice and forces him to realize he's been smuggling much more than he knows.

"Pru 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.

Colourful characters, subtle satire and social conscience is omnipresent in the hilarious adventures of Cape Breton pals Tinker and Blue in late-sixties San Francisco. It was Blue's idea to drive their fourth-hand 1957 push-button Plymouth out to San Francisco to check out the famed Haight-Ashbury district. Hitchhiking hippies, homespun humour, wit and wisdom, troubles in love and trouble with the law converge to make Tinker and Blue a funny and clever.

Smallish and inelegant, Shean?s postwar, post-industrial economy is in desperate disrepair, and the lengths that some civic leaders will go to in order to do "what?s best" sometimes requires a leap of faith that has unintended consequences. When a global corporation plans a daring scheme to exploit the remaining coal from an improbable source -- and thus to secure Shean?s economic future -- politicians try to marginalize the few voices of dissent. Some voices, however, are not easily silenced.

Descended from one of the three most prominent families in Acadia, Jeanne Dugas (1731-1817) and her family lived for more than thirty years under the threat of capture and deportation by the British militia and attacks by pirates and privateers. The story follows trials and tribulations from Louisbourg to Grand Pré, to Port Toulouse and Mira, Île-Saint-Jean, Remshic, Restigouche and back again -- often more than once. Captured by the British militia, the family was imprisoned, where three of her four children died.

In Somewhere I Belong, we meet young P.J. Kavanaugh at North Boston Station. His father has died, the Depression is on, and his mother is moving them back home. They settle in, and P.J. makes new friends. But the P.E.I. winter is harsh, the farm chores endless, and his teacher a drunken bully. He soon wants to go home; the problem is how. A letter arrives from Aunt Mayme announcing a Babe Ruth charity baseball game in the old neighbourhood. But Ma won't let him go. P.J is devastated. The weeks pass, then there is an accident on the farm. P.J. becomes a hero and Ma changes her mind.

It's lobster season at The Shores, a fishing village isolated from The Island in a storm surge. Parker, a collector of antiquities, moved there with his partner Guillaume, a chef just out of rehab. "Hy" McAllister, a writer looking for lobster recipes for a newsletter, also needs a speaker for her Women's Institute meeting. Enter Camilla, founder of the Lobster Liberation Legion. The legion starts freeing lobsters from their traps, angering the villagers and the man who runs Parker's fisheries empire.