Read Your Way Around Nova Scotia 2014 Edition – Part 2

Summertime at The Reader always comes with a peek at some of the novels that have been set within our beautiful shores. Enjoy once again a fictional tour of our province.

Fallsy Downsies by Stephanie Domet

Fallsy Downsies by Stephanie Domet tells the story of Lansing Meadows, a Canadian folk music icon, who has embarked on a final cross country tour. Accompanied by a young musician and a photographer, Meadows reflects on the humbling and certainly not glamorous life of a Canadian folk musician.

Waldenstein by Rosalie Osmond

In Waldenstein, a community in Nova Scotia with German roots, a girl becomes pregnant by a man in a rival family and she flees the community to raise her son. Years later, the son returns to Waldenstein to find his father. The story takes place in the first half of the twentieth century and depicts life in an isolated community in which “the people of Waldenstein are still living in a pre-Enlightenment world that is gradually crumbling around them.”

Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Bruce Graham

Hapless handyman Duddy is being sued over a faulty clothesline injuring its owner. His wife Minnie decides that she has had enough and it is time to leave. A humorous portrayal of small town life in Pictou Nova Scotia

Treading Water by Yvonne Leslie

Maggie’s daughter Abby has left to spend the summer in Nova Scotia, when Maggie reads something in Abby’s diary that disturbs her so much she gets on a plane and follows her daughters. Maggie encounters an old boyfriend from her past and faces issues she has not considered in years. Maggie’s and Abby’s relationship change as they face issues from the past.

Cartographer of No Man’s Land by P.S. Duffy

It’s 1916 in Nova Scotia and Angus MacGrath, despite his pacifist beliefs, signs up for the war in order to locate his missing brother-in-law. Angus is a sailor and a navigator and hopes to find work as a cartographer, but instead he finds himself in the infantry and on the bloody front lines. At home, his son Simon-Peter, faces his own turmoil about the war.

Someone Somewhere by Dana Mills

His stories of working class life are blunt and spare, and yet convey intense and raw emotion. In the first story, having spent months aboard a fishing trawler, the men are “broke up” both mentally and physically. Their release is a stop over in Greenland where there are liquor and girls, and not in a healthy combination. It’s a difficult story to read because of its harshness, but as with so many of Mills’ stories, there is a vulnerability and a softness.

Grist: a novel by Linda Little

Marriage does not always work out the way you might like. Penelope McLaughlin  marries a miller only to discover that his peculiarities force her to take on the running of the mill and the creation of home and family. Struggling and alone, Penelope must prepare her grandsons to take over the mill and pass on the family’s history to her granddaughter.