Kick of your summer reading with a local eBook! We’re highlighting 5 novels that are are available to borrow instantly from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick’s public libraries this summer – no holds or waitlists. If you’re new to borrowing eBooks, here’s a helpful guide from Halifax Public Libraries about how to get started.

Killings at Little Rose by Finley Martin (Acorn Press)
In a coastal village where what’s been buried doesn’t stay buried, what’s lost at sea doesn’t stay lost. 
Sleuth Anne Brown finds herself in an eastern PEI fishing community, working undercover for the new owner of a seafood-processing plant plagued by vandalism, loss, and ill luck. On the cusp of a clandestine love affair and herself keeping secrets, Anne must sort through gossip, rumours, and lies—and dodge the menace of violence—to uncover the canker at the core of Little Rose. But will she learn in time to prevent the mystery from becoming motive for murder?

Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS

The Lost Sister by Andrea Gunraj (Vagrant Press): Alisha and Diana are young sisters living at Jane and Finch, a Toronto suburb full of immigrants trying to build new lives in North America. Diana, the eldest, is the light of the little family, the one Alisha longs to emulate more than anyone else. But when Diana doesn’t come home one night and her body is discovered in the woods, Alisha becomes haunted. She thinks she knows who did it, but can’t tell anyone about it. 

Partially inspired by the real-life experiences of a former resident of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, The Lost Sister bravely explores the topics of child abuse, neglect, and abduction against a complex interplay of gender, race, and class dynamics.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS

The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe (Vagrant Press): Born into a basket of clean sheets—ruining a perfectly good load of laundry—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 felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England.

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. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. 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.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS 

The Sign on My Father’s House by Tom Moore (Flanker Press): 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.

A key relationship in the book is the one between Felix and his father, Walter Ryan, a stubborn man who tends to alienate the people around him. He came to Newfoundland from Alberta, but he never quite fit into life in an outport. 

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

Constant Nobody by Michelle Butler Hallett (Goose Lane Editions)
The time is 1937. The place: the Basque Country, embroiled in the Spanish Civil War. Polyglot and British intelligence agent Temerity West encounters Kostya Nikto, a Soviet secret police agent. Kostya has been dispatched to assassinate a doctor as part of the suppression of a rogue communist faction. When Kostya finds his victim in the company of Temerity, she expects Kostya to execute her — instead, he spares her. 

Writing about violence with an unusual grace, Michelle Butler Hallett tells a story of complicity, love, tyranny, and identity. Constant Nobody is a thrilling novel that asks how far an individual will go to protect another — whether out of love or fear.
Borrow now: NS | HFX | NB | CELA | NNELS

Browse the full collection at atlanticbooks.ca/100ebooks