National Network for Equitable Library Service

Don Messer was more than a household name in Canada — he was part of family life, the background music in Canadian kitchens — first on radio, and then on television. Private and unassuming, Don was everyman, and yet someone singular and special: a devoted family man, a rigid Calvinist, band diplomat, lover of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a musical prodigy who from the age of seven knew and played directly to an audience . . . an audience that eventually protested in unprecedented numbers on Parliament Hill upon CBC’s sudden cancellation of his show, Don Messer’s Jubilee.

Winner, Evelyn Richardson Memorial Prize for Non-FictionWell-known naturalist and artist Linda Johns shares her woodland home with a menagerie of injured wild birds — starlings, blue jays, pigeons, baby woodpeckers, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a semi-palmated sandpiper, and even a gannet. She and her “saner half,” Mack, have gone so far as to transform their living room into an indoor forest, complete with two dead trees providing a variety of perches and a screened porch making do as a practise flyway.

Stories shape the world, imposing order on chaos, and the stories we tell declare: I exist. Neil Bissoondath presses these assertions about narrative further. Stories are also, he says, forms of confession. Each time we tell a story, we reveal a little about our experiences, dreams, fears, desires, and fantasies. Unlike governments, which try to control and simplify narrative, fiction writers use narrative expansively, for exploration and discovery. Questions are numerous; answers are rare.

At 2:21 am on September 8, 1896, authorities in Nova Scotia killed an innocent man. Peter Wheeler — a "coloured" man accused of murdering a white girl — was strung up under a porch with a slipknot noose. The hanging was state-sanctioned but it was a lynching all the same. Now, a re-examination of his case using modern forensic science reveals one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Canadian history. On the night of January 27, 1896, 14-year-old Annie Kempton found herself home alone in the picturesque village of Bear River, Nova Scotia. She did not live to see the morning.

Lorna Drew thought her partner was carrying his absent-minded professor status too far, until, two years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease. A thoughtful memoir and a wide-ranging handbook, Different Minds is an illuminating side-by-side account of life with Alzheimer Disease. Prepared with the assistance of the Alzheimer Society of New Brunswick, it offers practical advice on everything from reorganizing finances to dealing with emotions.

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother . . . or was she? This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside “The A,” the infamous Agapemone,* named for the Greek word meaning Abode of Love. It was a religious cult founded in mid-19th century England by a defrocked clergyman who claimed to be guided personally by the Holy Ghost.

William Shakespeare lived at a time when the medieval world — a world of magic, astrology, witchcraft, and superstition of all kinds — was just beginning to give way to more modern ways of thinking. Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, and new ideas about the human body, the earth, and the universe at large were just starting to transform Western thought.

Setting out to visit his friends in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and with all intentions to return to the United States to attend Columbia University in the fall, Tappan Adney, at the age of 18, embarked on a trip that would ultimately set the course of his life. Tappan Adney's writings, illustrations, and photographs were published in Harper's Magazine. This follow-up journal to 2010's first volume, takes us back to a time when wildness was still something easily accessible and wildlife abundant.

In 1887, at the age of just 18, intellectually and artistically gifted American Tappan Adney embarked on his first trip to New Brunswick. He had plans to enrol at Columbia University in the fall, primed for a meteoric rise in academia — but fate intervened. He fell under the spell of the wilderness of Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and the local Maliseet people.

Where did passports come from? Why did 1930s stewardesses carry wrenches? And how did teetotalers shape the modern vacation? Wanderlust answers these questions and more, as author Laura Byrne Paquet delves into the social history of travel. Now a multi-billion dollar industry, travel is also one of the world's oldest.