Awards East Review

AWARDS EAST REVIEW

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atlantic books TODAY An exclusive collection of the East Coast’s recent nominated and award-winning books

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CMO’S MESSAGE We see it in survey data and we hear it directly from Atlantic Canadian book lovers every week: they love local books, but local books aren’t always easy to find. It’s a real challenge for publishers in our region, who produce hundreds of incredible locally authored books from all genres every year. They are available in independent bookstores and chain stores, as well as in libraries and for schools.

Yet, they aren’t always easy to find.

The challenge is on our industry to make these books more discoverable. Discoverable means simply that consumers have ample opportunity to find them, to recognize them as being books written by Atlantic Canadians, about Atlantic Canadian topics, and locally produced. We need to do more to help you find homegrown literary talent.

That’s what this review is all about. Featured here are 69 different titles, all of which have been shortlisted for significant literary prizes in Atlantic Canada. That means a jury of the creators’ peers have scrutinized these books and deemed them the best of the best. And they are all local.

We think the print version of this review makes a nice memento of writing, illustration and publishing excellence. Above all else, we hope this review helps you discover your next favourite book.

Publisher Chief Marketing Officer Editor Graphic Designer Program Manager Administrative Assistant

EDITOR’S MESSAGE Giving out prizes to books poses an interesting challenge in Atlantic Canada. We are a fairly small place that produces an abundance of great books. No one of our four provinces has more than a million residents. There has always been a certain appeal to the notion of lumping us together, bringing us past the two million mark, and doing the same when we give out book prizes.

But the same counterargument exists with books as does with geopolitical merger movements. We are a region of multiple unique identities and languages: Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, Inuit, Innu, Acadian, Gaelic, AfricanCanadian, New Canadian, Settlers and more. Each province also holds its own identity.

The result is that we do have a set of regional literary awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and we also have provincial awards for New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. And we have francophone book awards. Different sets of awards are given out at different times of year. Every spring we wait with bated breath once shortlists come out for the Atlantic Book Awards and the New Brunswick Book Awards; the Prince Edward Island Book Awards are biennial, as are the Acadian Éloizes.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards are given out annually each fall, with the categories for the awards alternating on a bi-yearly basis.

With this review, we wanted to bring together for you, dear lover of books, the most recent nominees for all the major literary awards in Atlantic Canada, in one interactive guide to excellence. We have written about most of these books before, and covered some of them specifically because they were shortlisted. This guide is to connect you with those stories in all their forms, and especially to the books themselves. Happy reading!

Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association Alex Liot Chris Benjamin Gwen North Chantelle Rideout Mallory Burnside-Holmes

Awards East Review is published by the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association (www.atlanticpublishers.ca), which gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage. Opinions expressed in Awards East Review do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Board of the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association.

Thank you to our partners

Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association Atlantic Books Today Suite 710, 1888 Brunswick Street Halifax, NS B3J 3J8 Phone: 902-420-0711 Fax: 902-423-4302 www.atlanticbooks.ca

CHARACTER BUILDERS

CHARACTER BUILDERS

Whatever their favourite genre, astute readers know the importance of good character development in literature. A skilled writer can sometimes do it in a single line, drop a hint of a distinguishing feature that hooks us, and suddenly we care—love ‘em or hate ‘em—about a character’s fate. From there we’ll follow their antics across sand and sky, from Mongolia to Mexico and even into perilous encounters with Leonard Cohen.

Novelists, short story writers, children’s book authors, even non-fiction writers, they’re all beholden to this fact: if your characters aren’t interesting, we aren’t interested. The authors of these books have obviously taken heed of the need for careful character development, bringing to the page some largerthan-life and unforgettable individuals.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

Boy With A Problem

The Appendage Formerly Known As Your Left Arm

Chris Benjamin Pottersfield Press

Julie Curwin Boularderie Island Press

Shortlisted: 2021 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction

WINNER: 2021 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction / 2021 Shortlisted: Margaret and John Savage First Book Award — Fiction

These 12 short stories feature the overwhelmed daughter of an alcoholic, an eco-warrior defying her entire hometown, a gay pastor in self-imposed exile, an anxious sadomasochist and a desperate hockey dad, among many others. Many of Benjamin’s characters can be their own worst enemies, obsessed with all the wrong things, muddled in their relationships and occasionally stumbling toward a better understanding of what ails them.

But they are never simple people and their desires are multifaceted. A search for a new home is layered into a desire to please the loved ones, live free and escape the remnants of poverty.

A yearning for social justice is linked to a father’s memories of simpler days. A revenge quest is at heart a need to be loved.

The empathy, tenderness and wisdom here is remarkable in its brevity, conveying so much about the human condition in each story, in so few pages.

Curwin’s characters—among them a guy obsessed with the chemical element selenium, a man calling himself Frederick Nietzsche, a human-sized frog who is a portent of a serious health issue and a dying dragon— are bent, if not broken. Many have experienced unbearable trauma, but Curwin draws the eye past the initial abuse or pain onward to the resultant adaptation. This is often a trick of the brain, an absorbed delusion on the part of the protagonist.

Her characters are usually even conscious, to some degree, of the deception. It serves them in some ways, diverts them in others.

Through it all there is love—people loving broken people; people loving life enough to keep trying.

These characters are almost all sympathetic, people we want to root for. Their twisted logic makes perfect sense if you listen long enough, and Curwin always does.

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CHARACTER BUILDERS

DIG

An Exile’s Perfect Letter

We All Will Be Received

Shortlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Fiction Award

Longlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Fiction Award

Longlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Fiction Award

Terry Doyle Breakwater Books

In 12 dialed-in and exceptionally honed short stories, Terry Doyle presents an enduring assortment of characters channelled through the chain reactions of misfortune and redemption.

Doyle’s characters are hard-working, blue-collar Newfoundlanders who keep their problems to themselves. They work construction, sell puppies online, do what they must. They are gritty, sometimes strong and they hold onto hope.

There is a griminess to these stories, but they are not bleak so much as tough, with characters who are determined to do well, to get better. Fellow Newfoundland author Michael Winter described the focus of the collection well: “The precarious inner workings of decent people trying to be good.”

DIG is critically acclaimed, landing on many awards shortlists besides the NLBAs. It was also a finalist for a Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Alistair MacLeod Prize and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award-Fiction.

Larry Mathews Breakwater Books

Memorial prof Larry Mathews is still somewhat of a Newfoundland secret. Everyone else: time to catch on. He’s been compared to Lisa Moore and Michael Winter.

Halifax novelist Ian Colford praises An Exile’s Perfect Letter as “a wryly observant and animated narrative that gleefully skewers academia and takes sly pokes at the cultural tensions between Newfoundland and mainland Canada.”

Also, his characters are a delight to hang with for the duration of the book, especially 62-year-old English professor Hugh Norman, who was all set to retire quietly when life (and a bit of death) got in the way. Norman’s self-deprecation is completely charming, even if his intelligent insights exceed his self-perception.

But Hugh is just one of a cast of eccentric characters in a narrative loaded with wit and wisdom.

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Leslie Vryenhoek Breakwater Books

Leslie Vryenhoek’s novel We All Will Be Received features a series of dislocated people, separated from the things that should anchor them. There is an ex-con going through rehab, someone who was abducted as a child, a single-parent filmmaker and a woman who created for herself a new identity to escape a terrible situation. In fact, every character here aims to reinvent themselves.

The other thing they have in common is that they are hard to forget, with their power to shift perspective and the narrative of their own lives. Vryenhoek dives deep into these diverse psyches, their struggles to rise from the past, to learn to trust again, to love. At its heart, Received is a novel of resilience and redemption, which is what makes its wild characters so relatable.

CHARACTER BUILDERS

Dirty Birds

Silver Hair & Golden Voice

WINNER: 2021 APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award Shortlisted: 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award – Fiction / 2021 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

Shortlisted: 2021 Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing

Morgan Murray Breakwater Books

Morgan’s brilliant trick is making an enduring protagonist from one whose most notable characteristic is his mediocrity, his very unremarkableness.

The man’s name is Milton Ontario, a bedroom community to a bedroom community, but he hails from Saskatchewan.

Murray makes this work by plunking his mundane man in Montreal, among coming-of-age poets and artists. He even meets his hero, Leonard Cohen. It goes poorly.

Thus his bland protagonist acts as straight man, accentuating the absurdity of modern-day humans and our ambitious quests for status and power in all its earthly forms. Dirty Birds has also been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads.

Ernest J. Dick Nimbus Publishing

Austin Willis was an actor’s actor, appearing in more than 30 movies over five decades starting in 1945.

During that career he worked with Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, William Shatner and Sean Connery, among many others, famously beating the gold-obsessed Bond villain Goldfinger at cards with help from Connery’s Bond. With his prematurely white hair, Willis made for a wry, debonair host of the 1970s CBC-TV quiz show, This Is The Law. Ernest J. Dick has done impressive research here, mining his personal library and conversations with Willis to bring back his voice, writing the memoir Willis had always wanted to write. To so fully recreate the life of a man after he has passed is a true accomplishment.

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Flying Ace

Sheilah Lukins Illustrated by Laurel Keating Breakwater Books

Longlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature Sheilah Lukins and Laurel Keating’s book charms in many ways, including with its bright images—evoking the spectacular confidence of its protagonist—and a first-rate adventure that features a late-night, top-secret flight across the Atlantic under enemy threat, with engine troubles.

But what really sets Flying Ace apart is Errol, the Newfoundland mouse whose delightful imagination is contagious, and who is clearly more clever than your average mouse, innovatively saving the day on at least one occasion. Artist and author work here in perfect tandem, creating lively anthropomorphic facial expressions that bring Errol to life. We know he’ll save the day—he has to save the day—because he’s a hero worth cheering.

This little treasure also won a Canada Book Award. .

CHARACTER BUILDERS

Catching the Light

The Sky Weaver

Burden

Shortlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature

Longlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature

Shortlisted: 2021 Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award

Susan Sinnott Nimbus Publishing

There is a bit of a will-they/won’t-they romance story in Susan Sinnott’s Catching the Light.

The tension of that uncertainty (that hoping they will) works because the characters of Cathy—a bullied but ambitious artist with a disability—and her charasmatic counterpart Hutch—an aspiring fisherman everyone loves—are so well developed.

Each of the two main characters has their own story arc and change in compelling ways throughout the course of the novel. They are supported by an equally fascinating cast of sub-characters of family members and friends. We get to know them all in a setting confined to a tiny fictional town that feels real because of the people.

Sinnott uses alternating points of view to unfold the tale, and masterfully dives into their differing view of the world. Their lives are ordinary but their perspectives are not.

This novel also won the Percy Janes First Novel Award.

Kristen Ciccarelli HarperCollins

Sworn enemies Safire—a warrior and high-level security guard— and Eris—pirate and dimension hopper—share a common mission.

Each character narrates from her own perspective.

The relationship between Safire and Eris arcs from antagonism to friendship as they share adventure and grave danger at every turn. Ciccarelli has embedded that dynamic into a world with intriguing, complex and entirely convincing gods, dragons, pirates and warriors.

There is in one sense a video game blueprint in effect, with each character bringing special skills and weaknesses. An added layer is their personalities and, more deeply, the values they hold dear. When those come into conflict or union, we learn more about human nature in this fictional realm.

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Douglas Burnet Smith University of Regina Press

Burnet Smith’s poetry collection is the story of Private Herbert Burden, a British soldier in the First World War who was executed for desertion, a sentence carried out in part by his friend and cohort, Lance Corporal Reginald Smith.

The shared surname of the executioner and poet is not coincidence.

The death of Herbert Burden, though extraordinary, was far from unique. He was one of hundreds of soldiers executed for desertion, in a time when post-traumatic stress disorder was not understood. Burden suffered from PTSD, which drove his actions.

Douglas Burnet Smith constructs this story in the voice of his uncle, Lance Corporal Reginald Smith, who carried out the execution of Private Burden. The author learned the story on discovering an old box of papers, detailing his friendship with Burden before he was ordered to join the firing squad that killed his friend.

Poetry shares the depth of emotional intensity associated with these events, as no other literary form could. In doing so, Smith pays proper homage to the men on whom his focus lies and helps us attain, in his words, a “better understanding of the ‘indirect’ atrocities that war produces.”

COMMUNITY SPIRIT When a piece of writing effectively evokes a setting, it goes beyond describing streets or known symbols. It takes you there either by effectively showing a known community, or by inventing and detailing one so completely it feels like it’s real, like we’ve been there before. That’s when a community—a physical place or a connected group of people—feels like it, too, is a major character.

The books described below are exceptional in this regard. They take us not only to a place, but to groups of people who share a certain understanding of the world, and way of being in it, that defines all their interactions with one another. They play by the same unwritten rulebook; violators are punished in commonly understood ways, but innovators can uplift the entire community.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

Savèches à fragmentation Jonathan Roy Éditions Perce-Neige

The Cove Journal JoDee Samuelson Island Studies Press

FR

Shortlisted: 2020 Les Éloizes: Artiste de l’année en littérature

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Jonathan Roy is back in force with a second collection of poetry that unfolds around the image of the savèche (which is the Acadian word for moth) to transport the reader into the questionable world of the Web. He questions the meaning given to Generation Y while building from poem to poem a prosody that is unique to him. Jonathan Roy is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding young poets of his generation.

JoDee Samuelson was born and raised pretty dang far from Prince Edward Island, in both distance and geography. Probably culture too. She originally hails from the prairies. And yet, she is an Islander through and through.

The artist and filmmaker (also gardener, bread baker, carver) has lived on the beautiful South Shore of PEI for more than 30 years. She has an artist’s eye, not only for the beauty all around her, but also the people, what makes them tick and what makes them uniquely Islanders. The Cove Journal captures the passing of the seasons, the rise and fall of gardens and the spirit of friendships with neighbours. This is a book for appreciating the quotidian in a beautiful place. Samuelson’s expressive illustrations tie it all together.

Samuelson has become well-known in that corner of the world for her popular monthly column in the Buzz, PEI’s entertainment newspaper, for the past eight years. In that space, she has captured the soft edges of rural life in the area, with unsurpassed observational skills that perhaps only the eye of an artist could muster.

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COMMUNITY SPIRIT

Winter Road

Some People’s Children

Shortlisted: 2021 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction

Shortlisted: 2021 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

Bridget Canning Breakwater Books

Wayne Curtis Pottersfield Press

Small towns talk. The flipside of knowing everybody is everybody knows you. No secret is safe.

The secrets of a small outport town in Newfoundland drive the tension in Bridget Canning’s Some People’s Children. Folks there have a common theory that Imogene Tubbs’ father is none other than Cecil Jesso, the local drug dealer—a man who is both feared and ridiculed.

The story uses the gossip mill beautifully, presenting an aggravating piece of mystery made all the more complex by smalltown gossip, a tight-knit community and the usual difficulties any given dysfunctional family provides.

It’s a tough scene to grow up in. Novelist Megan Gail Coles described this book beautifully: “Not since Joel Thomas Hynes’s Down to the Dirt has a Newfoundland coming-of-age novel so relentlessly depicted the taxing challenge of surviving adolescence in rural outports. This darkly comedic novel is one of indignities, epiphanies, and hope.”

Ultimately, Some People’s Children is about how to overcome the way other people see us, and learning to define ourselves. It was also a BMO Winterset Finalist and a 49th Shelf Editor’s Pick.

Wayne Curtis is synonymously linked with the Miramichi. Its landscapes and inhabitants play starring roles in his short fiction.

Far from glorifying a charmed pastoral existence, Curtis writes with unflinching honesty about the hardships of life in an impoverished rural community. His characters are burdened with regret, either for active mistakes or the path not taken. They are haunted by ghosts of imagined alternatives.

And yet, those who leave are haunted too, missing a simpler, more genuine life over one embittered by raw ambition, one more connected with family and friends in a place where people know one another.

The deep beauty of these stories is in their portrayal of a real place that is at the same time sweet and melancholic, framed by the always present beauty of the natural world, which he paints in loving detail. It takes that kind of intimate knowledge of a place to so expose the souls of its characters.

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CHARACTER BUILDERS COMMUNITY SPIRIT

Waiting Under Water

Before the Parade

The Dome Chronicles

WINNER: 2020 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction

Shortlisted: 2021 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award

WINNER: 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Riel Nason Scholastic

Waiting Under Water is a beautiful celebration of life in a small town, and all that is good about it.

Twelve-year-old Hope does not want to leave St. David’s, New Brunswick. Who would? But she has no choice. Her father has a new job in Ontario.

In an effort to accept the big change in her life, Hope decides to savour and enjoy every moment of her last summer in the place she loves.

To complicate matters, St. David’s is then chosen as one of five small towns to appear on a national television show as one of “Canada’s Tiniest Treasures.”

Of course she throws herself wholeheartedly into helping her town become the big winner of the show, earning the recognition it richly deserves.

And that involves capturing everything that makes St. David’s unique and special.

Which makes it that much harder to imagine living somewhere else. As reviewer Lisa Doucet wrote, “Nason is particularly adept at capturing a sense of place in this story and all the ways in which St. David’s is special for Hope.”

Rebecca Rose Nimbus Publishing

The impact of Rebecca Rose’s history of Halifax’s gay, lesbian and bisexual communities was apparent from the first launch, when the author received a standing ovation before she spoke a word. The publication of the book served once again to bring the community together to celebrate. It is the first ever full-length account of LGBTQ activism in Nova Scotia. It documents many significant firsts that collectively allowed this community more freedom to be themselves, privately and publicly. As the author told Atlantic Books Today’s Evelyn White, when her partner was sick, “I was able to climb into her hospital bed and comfort her. I know that the LGBTQ-plus pioneers ... fought for the freedoms that I enjoy. I am forever in your debt.”

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Garry Leeson Nevermore Press

A humourous collection of true stories, centred around a backto-the-land endeavour, and a unique building structure. Leeson writes with astute observation of the absurdity of the best-laid plans with joyous self-deprecation.

His stories focus as much on the community around him—the stoic and staid farm folk—as they do on his family’s own foibles and successes. As he tries to eke out a sustainable existence, the locals teach him a way of a life deeply rooted in community and heritage.

At the same time, he documents a continental movement, the 1970s backto-the-landers, mighty in number and determined to find a better, more authentic way to live.

The book is greatly enhanced by personal photographs in black and white, adding to the charming sense of tradition and sustainability. The last sentence of the collection leaves the book open, so to speak, to another chapter, perhaps a follow-up to this one’s success.

CHARACTER BUILDERS COMMUNITY SPIRIT

Cod Collapse

Blood in the Water

Shortlisted: 2021 Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing

WINNER: 2021 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction) Shortlisted: 2021 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award

Jenn Thornhill-Verma Nimbus Publishing

Silver Donald Cameron Viking Canada

Thornhill-Verma’s book sheds some long overdue light on the human element to the cod moratorium. As our reviewer Jeffrey Hutchings wrote, “Verma’s thoughtful and thought-provoking book combines personal, familial and societal experiences with historical and contemporary accounts of the fishery. She has produced a remarkably engaging blend of memoir, history, science and humanism...

“Aided by interviews with fishermen, scientists, union activists and journalists, she spends considerable text looking ahead to what a future cod fishery might, if not must, embrace. An emphasis on fishing practices and fishing gear—such as cod pots and handlines— that value quality over quantity. The necessity of traceable chains of custody for fish and fish products. A change in mindset towards achieving long-term, rather than short-term, sustainability.”

Philip Boudreau’s murder in 2013 became known as “murder for lobster” by several media outlets, but Silver Donald Cameron takes a deeper look at the case in his last book Blood in the Water: A True Story of Revenge in the Maritimes, also shortlisted for the Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction).

Cameron, who passed away in 2020, lived in D’Escousse on Isle Madame, Cape Breton, with his wife Marjorie Simmins, also an award-winning writer. According to Simmins, “It needed somebody like him who had lived here since 1971, who always had immense respect for the people he lived among.”

Through comprehensive interviews and research, Cameron explores the complexities of human character and justice involved in Philip Boudreau’s murder. He also reviews the Mi’kmaq and Acadian heritage of Isle Madame, and the failings of a punishment-driven British-Canadian justice system.

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CHARACTER BUILDERS COMMUNITY SPIRIT

What Your Hands Have Done

Live Ones

Sadie McCarney University of Regina Press

Chris Bailey Harbour Publishing

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Poetry)

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Poetry)

“With the prismatic eye of a witch-blessed Alden Nowlan, Sadie McCarney sculpts a hard-won beauty into the passion of her lines. ” —Marilyn Bowering, author of Threshold and The Alchemy of Happiness Sadie McCarney’s first full-length poetry collection grapples with mourning, coming of age and queer identity against the backdrop of rural and small-town Atlantic Canada. Ranging from pelletgunned backyard butterflies to a chorus of encroaching ghosts, Live Ones celebrates the personal and idiosyncratic aspects of death, seeing them as intimately wedded to lives well-lived. Personal mythmaking collides with grocery shopping, ancient history turns out to be alive and well in modern-day Milford, Nova Scotia and the complexities of queer female desire call out to us from beyond the grave.

What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields.

Bailey examines the world around him from the inside, observing the minute to account for the vast. These poems are laid bare and free of ornament, revealing the hard-won wisdom just below the surface.

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ENVIRONMENT As George Elliott Clarke said in a recent interview with our managing editor, “environmental degradation and our desperate attempt to stop poisoning the planet” may end up being the focus of a true national epic for Canada. One hopes that we can bring our current COVID-19 crisis under control soon, and bring renewed vigour to the myriad environmental crises we face.

It is clear that our authors are concerned. Whether diving deep into natural history, espousing love for the earth and soil and water, examining historical collapses, painting warnings of a dystopian future or embracing hope and galvanizing visions for a sustainable and humane future, award-winning Atlantic authors are showing that the environment is a concern of the soul, mind and body.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

Everglades

The Luminous Sea

Daniel H Dugas and Valerie LeBlanc Éditions Prise de parole

Melissa Barbeau Breakwater Books

Shortlisted: 2020 Newfoundland Book Awards Fiction Award

Shortlisted: 2020 Les Éloizes: Artiste de l’année en littérature

“Broken bottles transformed into sea glass. Boats rotted into the grass, ropes disintegrated in the water. Now you have all this plastic everywhere and it’s getting harder and harder to disappear us …

We’ve finally found the way to immortality, found a way to keep company with everything ancient down there, and it’s through trash.” In this powerful piece of allegory, Melissa Barbeau explores how we have changed the very landscape itself, by plasticizing it.

Thus, there is a “strange emergence of phosphorescent tides.”

And the discovery of a sentient fish. The human response is naturally to exploit the creature.

Except for one gentle-hearted protagonist, the star of the show.

She wins us over quickly and helps us empathize with small and large lifeforms. That empathy also causes plenty of suspense across a palette of stunning images and vivid, poetic prose.

Based on their exploration of Everglades National Park, Daniel H Dugas and Valerie LeBlanc map in this poetic essay the effects of human presence on the natural environment, the traces it leaves there. Everglades is an ode to the beauty, fragility and resilience of nature grappling with an invasive species—ours.

This bilingual French-English work, which includes magnificent photographic and composite works produced by the authors, is printed in limited quantities.

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ENVIRONMENT

The Miramichi Fire

Restigouche

The Forager’s Dinner

Shortlisted: 2021 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing

WINNER: 2020 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Nonfiction

Shortlisted: 2021 APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award

Alan MacEachern McGill-Queen’s University Press

As our New Brunswick partner Jame Fisher of The Miramichi Reader wrote, “[Alan] MacEachern manages to collate all available references from both sides of the Atlantic and, by applying his knowledge of environmental history, manages to create an extremely readable and engaging text on this littleknown part of Canadian history.”

The fire of note here is the Miramichi Fire of 1825. On October 7, 1825, a massive forest fire swept through northeastern New Brunswick, devastating entire communities.

When the smoke cleared, it was estimated that the fire had burned across 6,000 square miles, a fifth of the colony.

It was the largest wildfire ever within the British Empire, and one of the largest infernos in North American history.

Yet, until MacEachern’s book came along, it was little known across Canada.

Philip Lee Goose Lane Editions

Philip Lee’s book is a journey along the mighty river, Restigouche, which flows through the remote border region of Quebec and New Brunswick.

As The Miramichi Reader’s James Fisher writes, “Each bend and turn [is] akin to life.”

This is a book that lets us travel without moving. We can hear the run of the rapids, gaze up at the “soaring forest hillsides,” see the Atlantic salmon jump.

Fisher adds, “Learning this land’s history remains invaluable. This is present day exploration, research and experience we need now more than ever. And naturally, for the good of our environment.

“This book is an enlightenment, a flow of storytelling and insight through topography, literally, by way of a river called Restigouche.”

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Shawn Dawson Boulder Books

Shawn Dawson is a professional forager. He is a well-known farmer’s market vendor, selling varied edible plants he finds in the forests, fields, bogs, barrens, cliffsides and shorelines of Newfoundland.

A particularly delicious feature of this book is the set of recipes, each featuring local wild food. The recipes come from more than a dozen of Newfoundland’s best chefs.

As important a theme as is sustainable, wild food in this collection, it also serves as inspiration to get outside and get better acquainted with the natural world.

Dawson identifies more than 50 varieties of edible trees, weeds, berries and fruit, and gives practical advice on harvesting them without harm. The hundreds of fullcolour photographs help ensure proper identification, and make for a beautiful and aspirational book.

ENVIRONMENT

Mammals of Prince Edward Island

Curley, Daoust, McAlpine, Riehl and McAskill Island Studies Press

WINNER: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Non-Fiction) Our reviewer Richard Lemm calls this book “magisterial” in listing it as one of the Island’s best of the year.

He adds: “Handsomely illustrated with abundant photographs, drawings and distribution maps, Mammals is authored by distinguished experts in wildlife biology, zoology, forestry and resource management. These scientists are gifted writers whose prose is eminently lucid and enjoyable.

“Since most of these mammals inhabit other Atlantic provinces, this is a definitive resource for amateur naturalists, casual observers, teachers and students and specialists throughout the region.”

Humanimus

Waking Ground

Shortlisted: 2021 J.M. Abraham Poetry Award

Shortlisted: 2021 J.M. Abraham Poetry Award / 2021 Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award

David Huebert Palimpsest

“Say no to the death drive.”

“Picture a gash in the glut of the world.”

“A man who drooled pitch.”

This is the kind of language Huebert’s poems use. They are complex but they are playful at the same time, fascinating and provocative, filled with gut punches that knock a reader down before lifting them up.

From the Bovine Prophet himself comes this beautiful, provocative and often fun collection of poems centred around human-environment interactions. It features a transcendent section on oil, or more specifically its transformation from zooplankton into pollutant. Huebert loves scientific language and plays with it.

Humanimus presents a very real world of soiled nature, compromised ecology, toxic infiltration. Despite a heady theme, the book is consistently playful and fun to read. It’s also very personal, touching on fatherhood and falling in love, with plenty of pop culture references. It’s a postrenaissance renaissance.

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shalan joudry Gaspereau Press

Atlantic Books Today reviewer Annick MacAskill included Waking Ground on her list of 2020 must-have poetry books, citing its “use of sensory details and lyric introspection” in its “keen awareness of colonial history and the fragility of our surviving ecosystems.”

This is a collection that Canada needs at this time. It speaks specifically to the resilience of Mi’kmaw culture, but also forward to the collective work of healing and reconciliation that lies before all of us.

“Joudry incorporates Mi’kmaw into her English-language poetry, sometimes using individual words, sometimes composing entire poems in the Indigenous language alongside English translations,” MacAskill writes. She says a personal favourite is “Sipu’l” (“Rivers”), a response to an epigraph from Mi’kmaw poet Rita Joe, “creating the sense of an ongoing conversation across generations.”

CHARACTER BUILDERS ENVIRONMENT

Year of the Metal Rabbit

Keeping Count

WINNER: 2021 Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award

Shortlisted: 2020 The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize

Tammy Armstrong Gaspereau Press

M. Travis Lane Gordon Hill Press

These poems use masterful language to transport us to a kinetic landscape, alive with chaotic encounters with flora, fauna and neighbours: They say the sparrow and geese are a rain call boiling over with prognostication above the English walnut and the sky’s chipped teeth Or, in an ode to a caterpillar: This little banded em-dash, Turk’s head knot, two stroke engine signs across my palm Armstrong also laments the impact humans have on the rest of life: And there, along the old highway a raccoon’s small ghost disappears inside a storm-drain’s dark keep, and coyotes snagged in car grills hurdle down the Trans-Canada until resource officers in thick gloves can pry them loose—speed sick and lost Year of the Metal Rabbit is a gorgeous publication from Gaspereau Press. Our reviewer, Jenn Thornhill Verma, notes that, “With its textured lilac paper cover and inside cover featuring rows of sea stars lined against a black backdrop, the book feels precious, but its real gems are the poems inside.”

A prolific and prophetic bard, this is M Travis Lane’s astonishing 18th collection.

Despite its economy, it covers vast ground, with fantastic personifications of nature (“the water seemed almost subdued”) and reflections on the grand cycle of life and death (“running in a tight circle, nose to tail”).

Whether using short or long forms, what sets Lane apart is that she is among the most profound of philosophers, pondering and exploring threads rather than observing the obvious, or making bland political statements. As Yusuf Saadi describes her, “The spirited philosophical mind at work here—sometimes explicitly, sometimes slyly—on topics ranging from the conditions of perception and the natural world to the quietness of midwinter afternoons, brings pleasure with its depth.”

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CHARACTER BUILDERS ENVIRONMENT

The Knowing Animals

When Emily Was Small

Shortlisted: 2020 The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize

Shortlisted: 2021 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration

Emily Skov-Nielsen Brick Books

Our reviewer Annick MacAskill takes note of this collection for the “heat and wildness found within.

Tactile, dense and unrelenting, these poems examine sex, gender, ecology, reproduction, disease, decay and violence— and the myriad ways these categories overlap—through the eyes of a central speaker, who fixes her attention on ‘the ghoulish, / ambient dim of incubation.’”

This debut collection by Fredericton poet Emily Skov-Nielsen has also been shortlisted for a 2021 Relit Award for Poetry. It explores the way our consciousness is interconnected with surrounding lifeforms: trees, bugs and rivers; as well as with the atmospheres, even the cosmos.

Everything is connected here. No, entangled. It is a book that expands human understanding of nature, and gives poetic lessons in the life sciences.

Lauren Soloy Tundra Books

This is Soloy’s debut picture book. It features young Emily Carr, the great ecologically inspired artist from the West Coast whose work is recognized and celebrated throughout the world. Soloy gives a tender glimpse into the young artist’s heart and mind.

The story begins when Emily’s mother warns her not to dirty her Sunday dress.

But, of course, Emily traipses through her father’s vegetable garden, weaves through the currant bushes.

She is in a blissful state, experiencing will all her senses the bees, butterflies, blossoms. She is attuned to the mystery, hears music in the trees.

Our reviewer, Lisa Doucet, takes note of the lush and vibrant illustrations, “loose-lined with bold, dark outlines. Richly textured with depth and hints of shadows, the colours are beautifully saturated.”

Doucet selected the book as one of her must-have young reader books of 2020.

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What-Cha Doing?

Kim Renton Illustrated by Tamara Thiebaux Heikalo Chocolate River Publishing

Shortlisted: 2019/2020 Alice Kitts Memorial Award (Children’s Picture Books)

This simple story takes young readers on a journey through the maple syrupmaking process, outlining how the sap is first collected and then boiled to become syrup, which is then used to make maple butter and cream and candy. As Ben checks in with his various family members, young readers and listeners will get to see the incredible amount of work that goes into turning sweet-tasting sap into delicious maple products.

As our young readers editor, Lisa Doucet, writes in her review, “Tamara Thiebaux Heikalo’s gentle and lovely watercolour illustrations depict a close-knit family undertaking what appears to be a time-honoured tradition. She uses loose and sketchy lines with solid black outlines to create cheery images that perfectly capture the small details of daily life in a rural community.”

FAMILY EXTENDED There is a deep-seated and complex psychology to our closest human relationships, be they spousal, co-habitational, extended familial or best friendship. It is sometimes luminous, sometimes dark, sometimes a swirling mix of the two and much more.

It always has to do with finding our place in the world, and the relationships that make us feel we matter. That is an essential part of making life meaningful.

In other words, it is the stuff of great literature and story, complete with winding arcs, and more twists and turns in the road than a rally car race. Consider a solid long-term romantic relationship, how it might shift through surprises, disappointments, frustrations, delights, moving ever-so slowly from a union of raging passions toward one of mutually supportive always-got-your-back besties. Usually that’s about twelve novels worth of material.

The creators of these books cover varied genres, each in their own artfulness exploring human relationships at their best, worst and most elusive.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

The Spoon Stealer Lesley Crewe Nimbus Publishing

WINNER: 2021 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction) Our reviewer, Gemma Marr, says that there is a binge-worthy quality to Lesley Crewe’s latest novel, offering “a reprieve from the uncertainty of our contemporary moment.”

At the same time, it is a novel with depth, “a rumination on the unpredictability of life.” It is the story of Emmeline Darling, the titular spoon stealer, who crosses the ocean in search of not only adventure, but also a sense of belonging, while escaping from difficult familial relations.

“She oscillates between a sense of disconnect with her past and the intensity of some memories that feel omnipresent,” Marr writes.

Family looms large here, and the author observes: “What happens to one member of a family sends ripples through the nervous systems of the others. You are not one individual. You are linked to each other.”

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CHARACTER FAMILY EXTENDED BUILDERS

Good Mothers Don’t

The Silence of the Vessel

Shortlisted: 2021 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction)

Shortlisted: 2021 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction)

Laura Best Nimbus Publishing

Brenda MacLennan-Dunphy Pottersfield Press

In this gripping novel, Best brilliantly, and with great empathy, conveys the intense sorrow and pain of Elizabeth, a woman suffering mental illness in the 60s and 70s, and the loss it causes her. Best also dives into the societal “why” of matters, realistically portraying a community that is incapable of keeping ties with someone like Elizabeth.

Novelist Ian Colford notes that there is a hopeful side to the story. He writes, “In the end it is Elizabeth’s perseverance and determined spirit that makes it possible for her to reconnect with a world that left her for dead and begin the process of reassembling her shattered life.”

At its heart, this is a novel about the mother-daughter relationship. The sisterhood—the religious kind—complicates things.

Cecelia, who has always been a quiet child, wants to be a nun. Her mother, Elspeth, is perplexed that a modern teenager would consider such a thing. Especially given all the recent scandals in the Catholic Church on and around the Cape Breton home.

Cecelia consults with Madonna, an aging Sister she knows who tries to reconstruct all the reasons she was drawn to sisterhood in the first place.

It is a wonderfully written story of motherhood, familial love and devotion to a greater cause, and what that looks like in the age of science and reason. MacLennan-Dunphy does a wonderful job drawing parallels between the devotion of a mother and the devotion of a young woman giving herself over to God and Christ, and why hope underlies both those things.

Her characters are vibrant, realistically flawed and perfectly Cape Breton. :

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FAMILY EXTENDED

Czech Techno

Mark Anthony Jarman Anvil Press

Shortlisted: 2020 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction The latest collection from the New Brunswick short story master Mark Anthony Jarman revolves around music and travel, and the close but often challenging connections that develop among

musicians.

Sometimes bandmates come apart by the Pompeii ruins. Sometimes they bond on a nostalgic stroll past the homeless while “gentle Tunisian techno” rides the breeze.

Sometimes they go on Sunset Boulevard spending sprees.

Music—be it Top 40 hits or the sounds of sirens or other streetscape noises— accentuates these tales and keeps the beat for characters and readers. The rhythm though comes from Jarman’s sizzling, popping prose.

Beyond stories of unusual and talented people doing fascinating things, this is a heartfelt and moving collection about love and longing.

Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles JJ Steinfeld Ekstasis Editions

WINNER: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Fiction) J. J. Steinfeld’s eclectic work is welldeserving of award nominations. Through 20 books, including this his 13th collection of short stories, he has dazzled with the unexpected, work that is by turns disturbing and hilarious, and always impossible to categorize.

Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles is an eclectic and thoughtprovoking mix of short speculative fictions.

They dive headlong into the psychological landscape of humans stuck in the muck of the absurd and the existential.

Steinfeld is concerned with our strange desire for meaning, trying to make sense of the human condition. As our reviewer Elizabeth Johnston writes of Steinfeld’s work in an earlier review, it is, despite occasional mockery, “a testament to the imperative to keep trying despite the odds.”

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Meadowlands

Virginia Bliss Bjerkelund Chapel Street Editions

Shortlisted: 2020 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Nonfiction Award Bjerkeland’s ability to spin a tale is powerful here, drawing us into the story of a Morris and Harriet Scovil a century ago.

It is not for their fame that we’re hooked but for their remarkable story, and their close relationship with the land.

This true story engages as any novel would. From a starting point of having little to no knowledge of the Scovils, we are quickly hooked and fascinated by them, and invested in what happens to them.

This is an unusual and unforgettable piece of research and writing, in part because it is a tale told about fairly commonplace things, yet is so completely engaging.

FAMILY EXTENDED

Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire Allan Cooper Pottersfield Press

WINNER: 2020 The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize James Fisher of The Miramichi Review writes of Cooper’s collection that it features “beautiful, transcendent poems about life, family and growing older.”

He says the book has something for everyone, “but particularly ‘mature’ readers.”

These are some of Cooper’s most personal poems. He writes poignantly of his mother’s death, extending backward to childhood memories of his parents and his grandparents, offering fresh insights on life’s stages.

Part of the reason Cooper’s work is so insightful is that he draws inspiration from a diverse array of poets, including the Urdu poet Ghalib. This range gives him broad insight into the human condition, but also our connection with the world around us. These are poems of great substance and vision.

The publisher recommends we read slowly, cherishing each line. An excellent suggestion.

Avril’s Phoenix

Michelle Harris-Genge Five Crow Road Publishing

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Fiction) Avril Bale has a beautiful life, with a loving husband, a young daughter and a second baby on the way. But a tragic miscarriage rocks her sense of security, fairness and faith.

Avril’s Phoenix is a heartbreaker, its theme one of loss and grief, but the story holds tightly to hope. It is a moving and memorable novel.

The writing is lyrical, haunted by the protagonist’s loss personified by the natural world around her. But the pace never falters as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery, learning how to honour her lost child and those in the living world she still loves.

An important theme is dealing with family and friends who don’t know how to handle Avril’s grief. She finds humour and perseverance to be her best tools.

Harris-Genge shines a spotlight on a common but little discussed form of loss, a miscarriage, in a way that will resonate with any woman or family who has experienced the same.

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The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

Riel Nason Illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler Tundra Books

Shortlisted: 2021 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration This picture book features a quilt ghost in a world full of sheet ghosts.

And whatever realm you occupy, being different can be challenging.

Why is he a quilt when his parents and friends are all sheets? Being a quilt doesn’t allow him to zoom about the way his friends do.

But one magical Halloween he experiences something no sheet ghost could.

This is a delightful story about trying to fit in, find your people, that is supported by fantastic artwork by Byran Eggenschwiler.

Text and image blend beautifully to show that while being different is tough, diversity also leads to wonderful surprises.

The subdued colours of the illustrations perfectly capture the playful tone of the story, with just enough fright to bring readers into the spooky spirit of things.

CHARACTER FAMILY EXTENDED BUILDERS

I Talk Like A River

Annaka

Jordan Scott Illustrated by Sydney Smith Neal Porter Books

Andre Fenton Nimbus Publishing

Shortlisted: 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature

WINNER: 2021 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration

This is the story of Annaka, who has always hated that name. A move from Yarmouth to Halifax at age seven gives her the chance to change it to Anna. A return to Yarmouth as a teenager, after the death of her Grampy, leaves her sifting through scrapbooks and memories, and reunited with childhood friend Clay, who she thought was imaginary.

The story deals deftly with many difficult family issues from a teen’s perspective, including death, Alzheimer’s disease, moving, family secrets and the general difficulty involved with coming of age. In her review, Lisa Doucet notes that “Andre Fenton’s second novel for young adults, like his first, tackles numerous weighty issues.

His protagonist wrestles with grief and loss in a way that feels heartfelt and genuine, and her deep sadness and anxiety about her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s will resonate with anyone who has experience with this terrible illness.”

I Talk Like A River has already garnered numerous commendations, winning the Schneider Family Book Award, being named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book and being listed a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Awareness, Bookpage, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch. It has also been named a Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year and a CBC Best Picture Book of the Year.

Whew. This is the story of a boy who stutters and feels isolated, alone and incapable of communicating in the way he’d like. It takes a kindly father and a walk by the river to help him find his voice.

Our young reader editor Lisa Doucet says: “Sydney Smith’s illustrations capture every heartwarming nuance. They are fuzzy and indistinct at times, and then also luminous and precise, sparkling and light infused, portraying the moods and mystery of the river in his own unique and inimitable and profoundly perfect way.”

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CHARACTER FAMILY EXTENDED BUILDERS

Welcome to Camp Fill-inthe-Blank

Rika’s Shepherd Orysia Dawydiak Acorn Press

Hope Dalvay Acorn Press

WINNER: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Children’s Literature)

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Children’s Literature)

The story begins with Rika, a happy, energetic girl who has been helping her father run their farm and household ever since her mother died, six years earlier.

She longs for a Border Collie pup, not only for companionship but also to help her by herding the sheep.

Things begin to unravel with the discovery of a deadly coyote attack on Rika’s flock. Dawydiak does a wonderful job building tension with an unexpected series of challenges for Rika, including her father’s romantic involvement with a young veterinarian, which brings suppressed grief for her mother to the surface.

Rika is a convincing and compelling character, one with genuine struggles, a girl who loves her family and her animals, but like the rest of us, does not always make the right choice. The result is an action-packed adventure that will delight any young reader.

The true delight of this story is young Page’s creativity in coming up with all sorts of ways to keep her cousins engaged and active all summer, as she has promised to babysit them without letting them inside the house. The spunky and sporty neighbour, Moxie, is a particular delight here, with her extreme athleticism. It is surely never too early to introduce children to the concept of carpe diem.

Our young reader editor, Lisa Doucet, noted that she was charmed by various characters in the book: “PEI native Hope Dalvay’s debut novel is a charming, lighthearted romp that is filled with likeable characters and summer fun. The boisterous brothers, along with super-athletic and readyfor-any-adventure Moxie, are believably rendered and endearing, and while Page clearly has her hands full entertaining them, it is heartwarming to see how she ultimately succeeds in winning them over.”

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CHARACTER FAMILY EXTENDED BUILDERS

Maurice the Moose

We Wear Masks

Lorne Elliott Art by Lori Joy Smith Acorn Press

Marla Lesage Orca Book Publishers

WINNER: 2019/2020 Alice Kitts Memorial Award (Children’s Picture Books)

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Children’s Literature)

Possibly the most important book to read children at this moment in history. What is beautiful about We Wear Masks is that it shares a crucial message—one that may seem straightforward to adults but that leaves children questioning why—in a way that is boisterous, entertaining and full of love. Which makes sense, because wearing a mask is an act of love, a way to protect those we love and care for the human community at large.

Lesage does a wonderful job normalizing mask wearing, showing that although it feels new to many of us, certain professionals have always needed the protection to do their important work. That includes hospital workers, divers and anyone exposed to dust.

This is also a beautifully illustrated book, filled with positive images showing the bonds among loved ones, but also the needed safety measures currently in place.

Moose power!

There’s a certain melancholy to the perspective of a lonely moose lured by a hunter’s deceptive call. Fear not, young ones, Maurice the Moose is saved… by another moose!

But this is not an anti-hunting story, but rather an ode to friendship, to like mindedness, to finding our people. Or moose.

Famed folk musician and entertainer Lorne Elliott hits it out of the park with his first children’s book, a delightful story of moose bonding, brought to joyous life by seasoned children’s book illustrator Lori Joy Smith.

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MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS Each book is a world. The decision to crack the spine is like taking the red pill, i.e. deciding to change your perception of reality. Books shape how we see ourselves and the world around us.

These award nominees explore a fascinating diversity of cultural perspectives. Collectively they are an excellent cross-section of the worlds in our books, how they are influenced by the wider world and how we in turn use our stories to define ourselves and project that image abroad.

We are living in an increasingly globalized and complex world. Our identities are becoming evermore important, psychologically but also economically, in determining how we live together in this place.

These books show an increasing tendency of our authors and publishers to create content reflective of the diverse histories and contemporary realities of peoples in our region and connect those realities internationally. This should not be seen as a threat to anyone’s traditions, but rather a more fulsome exploration of who we really are, and the often-harsh realities from which we come. That diversity is to be celebrated, as are the wide array of books being produced and recognized with various awards on the East Coast.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

The Boat People

Sharon Bala Penguin Random House

WINNER: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Fiction Award Written by a Journey Prize-winner and inspired by a real incident, The Boat People is a gripping and morally complex novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage to reach Canada—only to face the threat of deportation and accusations of terrorism in their new land.

Bala has created a profound story with strong characters and elegant prose. The three perspectives are all engaging, fascinating, illuminating. Each show something different about the refugee claimants and Canada’s response to them.

We get a look at the bureaucracy and politics behind decisions on their 500+fates. We get a look in the jail where they stay, the psychological machinations—the cage inside the brain.

We get a look at life and survival, the brutality in Sri Lanka at war with itself. We get a look at Canadian life from a first-generation Canadian, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, who also has a fascinating and complex backstory. The result is completely engrossing.

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MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS

Speechless

B pour bayou

Anne Simpson Freehand Books

Richard Guidry Illustrated by Réjean Roy Bouton d’or Acadie

WINNER: 2021 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

WINNER: 2020 Les Éloizes: Artiste de l’année en littérature

Speechless is first and foremost a beautifully written and gripping story. It is also proof positive that poets write great novels.

Simpson presents a fascinating exploration of conflicting values—tradition vs. progress, east vs. west—and the complexity of determining what is right or just when dealing with sticky cross-cultural situations involving religion, race and gender. It is the story of a teenaged Nigerian girl convicted of adultery and a “white saviour” journalist determined to share the girl’s story, who unwittingly stirs up a hornet’s nest of troubles for everyone involved.

What is particularly remarkable here is that Simpson explores these difficult issues without ever stamping her own voice or perspective on the story. She leaves it to readers to decide for themselves, letting characters and situations make their cases on their own.

FR

Head down south to Louisiana, home of the Cajuns, descendants of the Acadians. Readers will encounter familiar terms like “bayou” and “gombo” and “jambalaya” (mm-mmm!).

But, as our reviewer Jo-Anne Elder notes, this book “will also introduce the reader to less familiar vocabulary, spellings and representations of Cadien culture. For instance, ‘cocodrie’ means alligator or crocodile, and the Spanish ‘crocodillo’ influences its pronunciation.”

The book is great interactive fun, with recipes and “cocodrie” drawing instructions. Haven’t you always wanted to draw a crocodile? Also included is the story of Hurricane Katrina as told by a six-year-old survivor.

“As [publisher] Marie Cadieux explains, the resilience and determination of French-speaking Cadiens, like all Katrina’s survivors, are as powerful as a hurricane. They fill us with hope,” Elder writes.

Elder has particular appreciation for New Brunswick artist Réjean Roy’s illustrations, which she calls “sophisticated, tempered and intricate on some pages and simple and bold on others.”

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MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS

At the Ocean’s Edge

A Long Journey

Listening for the Dead Bells

Shortlisted: 2021 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing

WINNER: 2021 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Margaret Conrad University of Toronto Press

A history of a province this thorough, this comprehensive, this impeccably researched, should not be so entertaining. But it is as engaging as it is detailed, a book that will meet all standards of academic rigour and intriguing storytelling.

Conrad shows that by the time Nova Scotia became a province of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, its multicultural peoples—including Mi’kmaq, Acadian, African and British—had come to a grudging, unequal and often contested accommodation among themselves.

Written in accessible and spirited prose, the narrative follows larger trends through the experiences of colourful individuals who grappled with expulsion, genocide and war to establish the institutions, relationships and values that still shape Nova Scotia’s identity.

Andrea Procter ISER Books

A Long Journey is a documentation of an important yet until-now overlooked part of Canada’s shameful residential school history. The Newfoundland and Labrador portion of the story has often been excluded, including during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, because when the residential school system began, Newfoundland was not yet part of the dominion.

But, as happened in other parts of the country, Newfoundland and Labrador schools separated Indigenous children (Inuit and Innu) from their families, communities and culture. As our reviewer Jenn Thornhill Verma says in naming the book to her 2020 NL Must-Have list, “while A Long Journey is authored by an anthropologist, it’s the voices of residential school survivors that make this book stand apart.”

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Marian Bruce Island Studies Press

The power of Marian Bruce’s book is the absolute rationality of the people sharing their spooky stories.

They seem like the most practical folks, as likely to be sceptics as anyone, except they’ve experienced things that make them question all known physical laws.

Mysterious lights, howling dogs, ringing sounds in the ear: these omens of death are part of a treasury of supernatural beliefs transmitted through centuries and across the Atlantic Ocean. Part memoir, part oral history—the author reflects on stories about bad fairies, witch control, ghosts, second sight, divination, healing incantations, attitudes toward death and other links between Prince Edward Island and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

And that’s the other thing: the source herself, Marian Bruce, an accomplished journalist and author. She considers these stories in a cultural and historical context, exploring their deepest meanings. It creates a fascinating mix of the chilling and the analytical.

CHARACTER BUILDERS MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS

Acadian Driftwood

Peace by Chocolate

WINNER: 2021 Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing / 2021 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award Shortlisted: 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Non-Fiction) / 2021 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Shortlisted: 2021 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (NonFiction)

Tyler LeBlanc Goose Lane Editions

Jon Tattrie Goose Lane Editions

In Peace by Chocolate, journalist Jon Tattrie traces the history of the Hadhads, a refugee family that rebuilt a thriving Syrian chocolate business in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, after the original one in Syria was “bombed flat” in 2012.

Tattrie was motivated in part by a desire to share the stories of the Hadhad women, who had tended to stay behind the scenes.

“Underneath it, I knew it was so complex and difficult, and I really wanted to know what it was like to go through that experience, and in particular, I wanted to know what it was like for the women,” Tattrie tells Atlantic Books Today’s Chelsy Mahar.

The Hadhads have completely charmed Nova Scotia and Canada. The prime minister gave them a shout out during a 2016 speech at the United Nations, and their business has been a massive success since, recently opening a new retail location on the Halifax waterfront.

And their book is one for our time, a rare note of positivity and an embrace of diversity, a case study in how it makes us stronger.

It’s incredible that this is Tyler LeBlanc’s first book. He hits it out of the park with this utterly engaging mix of memoir and historical storytelling.

In her review for Atlantic Books Today, Renée Hartleib writes, “Thanks to LeBlanc’s beautifully written book, brought alive in riveting detail, more of us will understand how the British tried to erase a people—the Acadians—from the landscape of the Atlantic region, and the horror these individuals experienced as their homesteads were destroyed and their families torn apart.”

The cultural erasure was strong enough that LeBlanc didn’t realize he himself was Acadian. He writes: “The surprising discovery set in motion a curiosity that plunged me into nearly four years of research and transformed the way I thought about identity, family and the history of the place I call home.”

We are all lucky that he found the truth. Hartleib calls the resulting book “a gorgeous piece of truth-telling, sure to make LeBlanc’s ancestors proud.”

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CHARACTER BUILDERS MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS

Teaching at the Top of the World

Jeopardy

Shortlisted: 2020 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Nonfiction Award

Winner: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Poetry)

Odette Barr Pottersfield Press

“I try to walk in another person’s kamiks [boots] every now and then so that I may begin to understand their personal point of view,” writes Odette Barr in her thoughtful memoir about her and her partner YoAnne Beauchamp’s decade teaching in the High Arctic. The couple made real efforts, as outsiders, to understand their host community, and to fit in.

“A sincere interest in learning about Inuit culture and Inuktitut language goes a long way in developing credibility and respect,” Barr writes. They were welcomed at significant community events and invited to feast on wild meat.

And in turn, they prepared a feast of roast polar bear for Thanksgiving. “YoAnne and I lugged two heavy plastic Co-op bags stuffed with … bear meat up the stairs to our apartment. We were so excited by this rare opportunity we videotaped the unpacking of the bags.”

Atlantic Books Today reviewer Evelyn White recommends this book to anyone “hoping to bridge racial divides.”

Black Matters

Richard Lemm Acorn Press

In his fifth collection of poetry, Richard Lemm, who teaches creative writing, Canadian literature and environmental literature in the English Department at the University of Prince Edward Island, takes readers on narrative, poetic journeys. We travel with him to a dazzling array of times and places, always with fascinating companions: Eden with Adam and Eve; Assisi with a Jewish surgeon on pilgrimage; America’s first imperial war with Lemm’s grandfather; with pupil and teacher in pre- and postrevolutionary Cairo; and to a British penal colony in Tasmania. Each journey is as much about liminal spaces, from struggles with mental health to ancient civilizations struggling to balance modernity and tradition to the global urgency of our myriad environmental crises. With all its diversity of experience and perspective, Jeopardy is a glimpse at a tumultuous world in peril, but also a taste of what great beauty is at risk.

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Afua Cooper Photographs by Wilfried Raussert Roseway Publishing

WINNER: 2021 J.M. Abraham Poetry Award Shortlisted: 2021 APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award

Black Matters features interplay between photographer Wilfried Raussert and poet Afua Cooper, where the former presents a picture, the latter responds not with description but with meditative reflection on what the image inspires. A perfectly syncopated appreciation, cherishment, of Blackness results, informed by centuries of marronage, steeped in Nina Simone’s wail, framed by the raised fists of Black Panthers and celebrating all that will be won.

Reviewer Evelyn White notes some wonderful passages, including this to Cooper’s daughter: “How my love for you at this moment is so sweet and sad / But I am proud of you and your womanly ways, your smartness and intelligence, your kindness and humility.”

And in “John Ware: Magician Cowboy”: “You speak the language of horse and cattle / Part of the brotherhood of Black cowboys who have been erased from the history of the West.”

MULTICULTURAL MOSAICS

Mi’kmaq Alphabet Book

Shiny and New

Shortlisted: 2019/2020 Alice Kitts Memorial Award (Children’s Picture Books)

Longlisted: 2020 Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature

Shyla Augustine Illustrated by Braelyn Cyr Monster House Publishing

This beautifully illustrated picture book is a wonderful way to familiarize young children with the Mi’kmaw language, an important first step toward learning. Books like this are an essential resource for keeping the language alive and allowing it to thrive.

From Ant (Gligoetjit) to Wolf (Paqtism) and beyond, the Mi’kmaq Alphabet book is sure to delight the young and the young at heart. Braelyn Cyr’s vibrant illustrations are a delightful pair to Shyla Augustine’s first baby board book.

Both artist and author, who live in New Brunswick, say they enjoyed the work of translating and working with their language, reconnecting with their language, culture and community while coming to better understand themselves.

Robert Chafe Illustrated by Grant Boland Breakwater Books

In her review for Atlantic Books Today, Lisa Doucet says of Shiny and New, “This story is spare and sentimental in the best possible way, tender, and true. It is a quietly powerful reflection on loss and love, on letting go and opening up to new ways of seeing those around us. It is a story for all ages and all times, but especially for now.”

This is a contemporary story about community and the true Christmas spirit.

It is a story of a little girl who has lost her grandmother, whose grandfather is grief-stricken and whose mother is hosting newcomers to the town for dinner. Abigail is frustrated because the holiday concert is suddenly being held in the gym instead of at the church. To make matters worse, her mother is putting away their Christmas tree and decorations.

As Doucet explains, “Abigail Maureen Margaret-Rose Davis is indignant. Until Pops helps her, and all the assembled dinner guests, discover the real meaning of Christmas.”

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Paint the Town Pink Lori Doody Running the Goat

Shortlisted: 2020 Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature This is a story about making adjustments to new situations.

“In Paint the Town Pink, a flamingo wonders if a certain town might make a perfect new home,” says Atlantic Books Today reviewer Lisa Doucet. “But there is more to home than just a pretty place.”

Our lead flamingo, Rose, wonders if she can fit in here, if she can find that elusive sense of belonging in a new environment.

Luckily, the townsfolk are warm and friendly, and they go to great lengths to make her feel at home, to show her that she can be herself and find a sense of belonging.

The message for readers is that, as Doucet writes, “We, too, can make new homes for ourselves, with support, encouragement and openness.”

SECRETS & LIES A good storyteller knows that a little deception goes a long way in building the coveted tension that keeps readers turning the page. But how much should be foreshadowed for the reader? How much should be revealed as a twist? Will the tension come from what characters don’t know (or the incorrect things they believe to be true), or from what readers don’t yet know?

Answering these questions, that’s where the mastery comes in. For a nonfiction writer, some of these questions are already answered; the public knows what it knows. That poses an even greater challenge, how to sort through what is known or believed and new findings by the author and weave it all together into a cohesive and riveting tale.

The books below have all been recognized, by one awards jury or another, for their skillful use of fact, fiction and downright deception. They contain edge-of-your-seat writing, not for the faint of heart.

For more information, stories, author interviews or to purchase these books, visit atlanticbooks.ca.

Unveiled

Capturing Crime

Carolyn Morgan Flanker Press

Carol Taylor New World Publishing

Longlisted: 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Fiction Award

Shortlisted: 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Morgan builds a mystery within a sensory tour of the Italian landscape, featuring Rebecca Howell’s search for understanding why Giovanni Strazza’s Veiled Virgin masterpiece was allowed in 1856 to travel all the way to Newfoundland, where it remains to this day.

She discovers that although the work is signed by Strazza, it is not listed with his other sculptures, and there are no existing documents for the sale of the work. Rebecca’s search is a labour of love that takes her through Italy’s historic cities and across majestic countryside. She explores Milan, Rome, Florence, Vinci and Piedmont in search of answers.

Her journey begins as a quest for knowledge but soon becomes one of self-discovery, and further, one of better understanding an unexpected Newfoundland-Italy connection, related to Giovanni Strazza’s model for the Veiled Virgin. Morgan beautifully rolls together elements of history, travel, art and mystery.

Carol Taylor presents a collection of some of her vibrant trial drawings going back to the 1980s.

Atlantic Books Today reviewer Evelyn White praises Taylor’s ability to bring us back to key dramatic moments in New Brunswick courtroom history: “Her courtroom sketches for the 1985 trial of then New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield reveal the stoicism of a politician who was charged with possession of about an ounce of marijuana that was allegedly found in his luggage at an airport…

“Taylor’s sketch of a constable guarding a bulky evidence bag during a murder trial transports readers right to the scene… Taylor’s drawings of judges, jurors, lawyers and the accused are augmented by portraits of various expert witnesses who testified at the trials she attended. Among them: a forensic pathologist, a DNA researcher and a footwear specialist.”

Included in the collection are scenes from trials bearing the names of the wealthy and powerful, Irving and Oland being of particularly public interest.

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SECRETS & LIES

You Were Never Here

Killings at Little Rose

Keep This to Yourself

Shortlisted: 2020 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction

Shortlisted: 2020 Prince Edward Island Book Award (Fiction)

WINNER: 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature

Kathleen Peacock HarperCollins

You Were Never Here also made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2020, in the Young Adult category. But as James Fisher points out in naming it to his own list, New Brunswick’s musthave books of 2020, he writes, “Don’t let the categorization of this novel fool you though. This mature adult reader thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Our young readers editor, Lisa Doucet, who also named the book to her must-have young reader books of 2020, calls it “a taut and carefully crafted mystery [that] masterfully blends elements of romance, family drama and self-acceptance into the plot to make this a nuanced and compelling read on numerous levels.”

Doucet also praises Peacock’s characters, especially a “sympathetic, smart and likeable” protagonist, perfect pacing and beautifully depicted small-town setting. “This is a book that satisfies as a multi-layered mystery but offers much more as well, including a sensitive exploration of family relationships and of the complexities of friendship.”

Finley Martin Acorn Press

In addition to revealing key plot points with perfect timing, a mystery writer relies on scene setting detail to take readers into a world where things aren’t what they seem. Our reviewer Desiree Anstey explains Finley Martin’s skill in this regard: “Through Anne, Martin gives the reader significant insight into the lobster fishing and processing industry with remarkably detailed narration. We crack into the lobsters, right beside Anne, as the beads of sweat drip down her forehead. The familiar sound of the women’s chitchat— centred on the old, secret remains of a baby discovered in a field—hums in the background before getting lost in the noise of machinery.”

Martin has created a wonderfully engaging lead detective who must control her emotions as she sorts gossip, rumours, family grudges, betrayals, secret identities and lies from truth, all at considerable risk to herself.

“Finley’s latest novel once again demonstrates his remarkably deft hand in crafting compelling stories of great intrigue,” Anstey writes.

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Tom Ryan Albert Whitman & Company

The initial tension lies with the fact that our hero, Mac Bell, only wants to put the past behind him and move on, but the “Catalog Killer,” who murdered his best friend Connor and three other people, is still on the loose. A cryptic message from Connor sets events in motion.

Underlying this main tension is the nature of the boys’ friendship when the murder happened, with Connor a popular, artsy boy who many girls crushed on, and Mac a shy and just-out-of-the-closet teen ready to leave town.

Ryan seamlessly works with these two tensions, that of friends growing up and growing apart, and that of having a friend violently ripped from your life. It’s easy to cheer for Mac, and wear every tense scene in our own jaws, as he tries to solve the mystery of his best friend’s murder.

Ryan’s plotting and structure and picture perfect down to the very last, and most surprising, twist.

SECRETS & LIES

The Ghost Road

Aftershock

The Grey Sisters

WINNER: 2020 Bruneau Family Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature

WINNER: 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Fiction)

Shortlisted: 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature

Charis Cotter Penguin Random House

Like Tom Ryan, Charis Cotter effectively weaves together tropes from two different genres, in her case bringing together the supernatural with interesting cross-cultural observations. Her Ruth is a big-city girl, a fish out of water when she stays in Newfoundland with family she’s never met.

At first she finds the Newfoundlander branch a little too superstitious, too preoccupied with ghosts and family curses.

Her budding friendship with her cousin Ruby challenges her own more scientific perspective, especially when they discover a secret family curse that has them in imminent danger.

It’s a thrilling story that grapples with heavy family themes around old grudges, multi-generational trauma and domestic violence.

Ruth and Ruby inspire with their strength, willingness to forgive and love, and to break the family curse, indeed to break free from a bitter history.

Alison Taylor HarperCollins

Taylor deals sensitively and insightfully with the lasting impacts of trauma, using two brilliantly written perspectives, that of a mother and daughter.

Their writing is so utterly convincing we feel pulled into the characters’ pain, and wonder how we ourselves would deal with it, how it would affect our own relationships.

The story is also a taut page turner. It’s advisable to take it slow though, to savour the skill of the writer. But one wants to find out what happens next, pronto. Novelist Zoe Whittall called Aftershock “a riveting exploration of two tough women, a mother and a daughter, on a separate but similar journey, to figure out who they want to be and how to love each other again.”

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Jo Treggiari Penguin Random House

Our reviewer Lisa Doucet writes of The Grey Sisters: “Treggiari’s latest teen thriller weaves multiple storylines together into a single propulsive narrative.

Told from multiple viewpoints, it is a multi-layered, carefully nuanced tale that explores the complexities of grief, how we define family and what it means to be brave and to be a true leader.

“Tension runs high throughout the story as unexpected revelations mount, and readers will enjoy the riveting plot, highly sympathetic characters and richly complex relationships.”

It is a story that opens with a bang and instantly hooks us, but in addition to being compellingly readable, it packs a huge emotional wallop.

APMA Award shortlist celebrates exceptional publishers and authors

By Chelsy Mahar The Forager’s Dinner by Shawn Dawson, Dirty Birds

by Morgan Murray and Black Matters by Afua Cooper with photographs by Wilfried Raussert were all shortlisted for the 2021 Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association Best Atlantic-Published Book Award, which celebrates excellence and achievement during the publishing process that helps a book come to life.

The jury made note of two other intriguing submissions: A Like Vision by the McMichael Canadian Art Collective (Goose Lane Editions) for its recognition of The Group of Seven and intricate design, and Un monstre dans ma cuisine by author Marie-France Comeau and illustrator Isabelle Léger (Bouton d’or Acadie) for its timely, lively illustration of bread-making, popularized during the Covid pandemic. In their citations they wrote, “[We] wanted to highlight how each of the publishers who submitted to this year’s award did a great job getting the word out despite everything, pivoting and adapting to new ways of reaching readers.”

Boulder Books helped bring local forager Shawn Dawson’s vision to life and share the beauty of Newfoundland’s wild edible cuisine.

“Shawn has influenced the community in the sense of bringing foraging to a modern place, and bringing it back around,” says Blayre Way, marketing manager for Boulder.

Breakwater Books worked with Morgan Murray to bring his debut novel, Dirty Birds, to life. “I think it’s a perfect reflection of the content and the messaging that Morgan has in the text,” says Rebecca Rose, president of Breakwater Books.

Black Matters by poet Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert explores Black experiences and visibility across different cities.

“It’s important that we’re telling Black stories, and Black Canadian history because, you know, Black Canadian stories are often not told,” says Oyinda Alaka, publicist teams promotion manager. “In Afua’s book she talks about Black joy, not just resiliency or racism, which is one of the dominant stories you hear from the Black community. But she talks about Black joy and happiness, and living life as a Black person, and to us, it was important that we’re telling stories from that point of view too.”

Chelsy Mahar is a freelance journalist and aspiring poet who is passionate about people.

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2021-06-01

11:26 AM

Ron Such Atlantic Sales Representative 902.680.2498 rons@friesens.com

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