It doesn’t feel like like summer here at the Halifax Reader until we’ve toured Nova Scotia in fiction. Let’s enjoy a literary tour of our beautiful province with some of this year’s additions to the library’s collection.


White Eyes: 16 stories (M)
by Larry Gibbons


In this series of sixteen short stories, a white man relates his experience of living on a First Nations reserve with a native woman. He was not there as a person delivering a service or doing a job, but as an outsider who was open to new ways of looking at life and was willing to learn.


A Possible Madness (M)
by Frank MacDonald


In Shean, a fictional town in Cape Breton, a community is dealing with its economic future as well as its past as a coal mining town. Shean has hit hard times and is facing an uncertain future when a global corporation appears with a plan to access the remaining coal. The prospect of prosperity versus the disruption of a community’s traditional way of life divides the residents.


The Men’s Breakfast: 19 new stories from Cape Breton Island  (M)
by Ronald Caplan


The Men’s Breakfast  is a collection of nineteen stories by new and established Cape Breton writers. The stories display a depth and maturity in writing with the stories crossing genres including crime and fantasy along with regional fiction. The locales extend beyond Cape Breton and include stories of murder, compassion and the power of motherhood.

The Rest is Silence (M)
by Scott Fotheringham


The Rest in Silence is partially set in North Mountain Nova Scotia. As a world-wide apocalypse brews, a man retreats to rural Nova Scotia and gets back to basic living. He constructs a cabin, grows his own food and builds meaningful relationships with the locals.


The Sissiboo Redemption (M)
by Jim Freedman


The Sissiboo Redemption is set in Weymouth Falls around 1883. Weymouth Falls had been settled by Black Loyalists in the late 1700’s. Largely a mill town, the narrator relates how he lost his arm, relieving him from mill work and freeing him to write and to tell this story. The residents, black baptists, are divided over whether they should join the white church or remain independent. The Baptist pastor Randolph Langford personifies their conflict with his dual personality, sometimes able to lead and inspire and other times succumbs to drink and temptation.

Source: http://www.thereader.ca/2012/07/read-your-way-around-nova-scotia-part-2.html