The province's premier journalist tells the story he was born to write.No journalist has travelled the back roads, hidden vales and fog-soaked coves of Nova Scotia as widely as John DeMont. No writer has spent as much time considering its peculiar warp and weft of humanity, geography and history.The Long Way Home is the summation of DeMont's years of travel, research and thought. It tells the story of what is, from the European view of things, the o...

A writer returns to Nova Scotia, and finding it almost unrecognizable, sets out to capture the essence of his ancestral province--a place as strange and wild as anywhere on the continent.John DeMont visits places as diverse as a Buddhist abbey; the first free black settlement outside Africa; an island that harbours pirate treasure; and a backwoods barndance where the music of 18th-century Scotland lives on. He visits tuna smugglers and moonshiners; the brooding painter Alex Colvill...

A major new work of history, told through the stories of a teeming cast of characters.The history of coal is the story of the last two centuries of the industrialized world. Coal has powered that world, and controlled the destinies of millions. And nowhere has that influence run more deeply than in Nova Scotia, where the industry’s rise and decline has transformed society twice.Coal Black Heart is a global history that centres unapologetically on one provin...

A Good Day's Work is a lyrical journey through a semi-mythological place: the Canada of our imagination. It is the Canada of the day before yesterday. Or perhaps the Canada of 1967 -- the country's "Last Good Year," as Pierre Berton dubbed it. It is a portrait of Canada captured by way of encounters with a blacksmith, a cowgirl, a milkman, a traveling salesman and other custodians of trades from another time. Woven into the always engaging, sometimes strange, sometimes moving and ...

The author of 100 Things You Don't Know About Atlantic Canada for Kids shares 100 intriguing facts about the Bluenoser Province.Did you know that the Halifax–Dartmouth ferry was once operated by a team of nine horses? Or that Babe Ruth used to visit Yarmouth regularly for hunting and fishing vacations? Enter journalist Sarah Sawler: your guide to discovering 100 fascinating things you don't know about Nova Scotia—from robberies and murders to famous landma...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour • The follow-up to the back-to-back successes of How to Be a Canadian (over 110,000 copies sold) and Happiness™Will Ferguson spent a three-year period criss-crossing Canada and back again. In a helicopter above the barrenlands of the sub-Arctic, in a canoe with his four-year-old son, aboard seaplanes and along the Underground Railroad, Will’s travels have taken him from Cape Spear on the...

Causeway is Linden MacIntyre’s evocative memoir of his Cape Breton childhood. At once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a reflection on fathers and sons, the narrative revolves around the construction of the Canso Causeway that would link the small Cape Breton village of MacIntyre’s childhood to the wide world of the mainland. Shot through with humour, humanity and vivid characters, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that ha...

#1 BC bestselling book of 2017Winner of the 2018 BC Book Prizes' Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice AwardA collection of stories chronicling the characters and dramas that capture life in small coastal communities.In this story collection, Pat Carney follows the rhythms of day-to-day life in coastal BC. Featuring a revolving cast of characters—the newly retired couple, the church warden, the musician, the small-...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction • Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and CBC Canada Reads • From the acclaimed author of Jennie’s Boy and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston's luminous Newfoundland memoir is a story of fathers and sons, exile and belonging, and reimagined national history—told with familial intimacy and the grandeur of myth.Baltimore’s Mansion i...

A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world“Excellent . . . calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New YorkerThe bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing ...

The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially f...

In 1912, Carl Stearns Clancy undertook the longest, most difficult and most perilous journey ever attempted on a motorcycle. By June 1913 he had made history, becoming the first person ever to travel round the world on a motorbike. A century on, bestselling author and biker Geoff Hill recreates Clancy’s historic journey and ends up on the road trip of a lifetime. Following the same route, and with Clancy’s account of the journey echoing in his head, Geoff travels through Europe and north A...