#ReadAtlanticEbooks: Atlantic Fiction
Summer reading just got a whole lot better! These award-winning and bestselling novels are available with unlimited access all throughout August for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia public library users. No waitlists!
Books can be borrowed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick’s OverDrive/Libby apps as well as on the accessible platforms of the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) and the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA).
The Sign on My Father’s House by Tom Moore (Flanker Press)
NL Reads winner The Sign on my Father’s House is a novel about a young man’s rough ride into adulthood. Felix Ryan is on a journey to discover who he is and where he is headed. He moves from rural Newfoundland to the hectic university life of the late 1960s. It is a world of music, girls, and new experiences way beyond his home-life experiences. He falls in love, gets married, breaks a heart, and gets his own heart broken.
He drives across the island on Joey’s Trans-Canada Highway through Clarenville, Gander, Grand Falls, Corner Brook and Port Aux Basques, where the boat to his future waits. His decision to stay or go depends on one last french fry on his plate and an angel who comes to guide him. This is a novel about finding your own voice and putting up your own sign about who you are and what you believe. Not so much for the outside would, but for yourself.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
Blaze Island by Catherine Bush (Goose Lane Editions)
A Globe and Mail Best Book 2020 and one of 49th Shelf’s Books of the Year!
The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of the isolated house where Milan Wells, a climate scientist whose career was destroyed by climate change deniers, lives with his daughter Miranda.
Seemingly safe in her father’s realm, Miranda walks the island’s rocky shores, helping her father with his daily weather records. But the stranger’s arrival breaks open Miranda’s world, stirs up memories of events of long ago and compels her to wonder what her father is up to with his mysterious weather experiments. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly that she hardly knows what has happened or what the unpredictable future will bring.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe (Nimbus Publishing)
Emmeline never quite fit in on her family’s rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans.
When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful—perhaps several spoonfuls—of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy.
A Globe and Mail bestseller, The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women’s friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
Dirty Birds by Morgan Murray (Breakwater Books)
Dirty Birds was longlisted for Canada Reads 2021, shortlisted for the 2021 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and won the 2021 APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award. It’s a hilariously iconic and irreverent book, a quest novel for the twenty-first century—a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller—where a hero’s greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime, and sleeping in all day.
“Canadians rejoice! Our Vonnegut has finally arrived! Morgan Murray’s debut is a great, brawling, sprawling, muscular glory of a story. Funny, dark, and wholly original.”
– Will Ferguson, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
Like Rum-Drunk Angels by Tyler Enfield (Goose Lane Editions)
Francis Blackstone is a fourteen-year-old gunslinger with a heart of gold. He’s fallen for the mayor’s daughter and resolves to make his mark, and his fortune, to win her favour. And what better way than to rob a Manhattan Company bank? Enter Bob Temple, the volatile outlaw who takes Francis under his wing— though not without a degree of suspicion— and so begins the adventures of the Blackstone Temple Gang as they crisscross the west in search of treasure, redemption, and the possibility of requited love.
At once a tribute to boyhood enthusiasm and the heroes of classical quests, Like Rum-Drunk Angels, winner of the Spur Award for Best Traditional Novel, is an offbeat, slightly magical, entirely original retelling of Aladdin as an American western.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
Crow by Amy Spurway (Goose Lane Editions)
When Stacey Fortune is diagnosed with three highly unpredictable — and inoperable — brain tumours, she abandons the crumbling glamour of her life in Toronto for her mother Effie’s scruffy trailer in rural Cape Breton. Back home, she’s known as Crow, and everybody suspects that her family is cursed. With her future all but sealed, Crow decides to go down in a blaze of unforgettable glory by writing a memoir that will raise eyebrows and drop jaws. She’ll dig up “the dirt” on her family tree, including the supposed curse, and uncover the truth about her mysterious father, who disappeared a month before she was born.
Winner of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the IPPY Award for Best First Book, and runner up for the 2020 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, this witty, energetic book crackling with sharp Cape Breton humour, is one you don’t want to miss: a story of big twists, big personalities, big drama, and even bigger heart.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
Good Mother’s Don’t by Laura Best (Nimbus Publishing)
It’s 1960, and Elizabeth has a good life. A husband who takes care of her, two healthy children, a farm in the Forties Settlement. But Elizabeth is slowly coming apart, her reality splintering. She knows she will harm her children, wants to harm her children, wants to be stopped from harming her children. She doesn’t sleep, becomes incoherent. Elizabeth is taken away.
We rejoin her in 1975, “well” once again, living in a group home and desperately trying to fill in the enormous gaps electric shock therapy has left in her memory.
Shifting through time and points of view, acclaimed author Laura Best’s first novel for adults allows us to see the ripple effects of mental illness and its treatment in the mid-twentieth century. Good Mothers Don’t is a moving exploration of illness, memory, and how we fight for who we love.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS
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