National Network for Equitable Library Service

In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province's most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound.

After years of struggle by Blanchfleur to maintain its independence, the idyllic walled city of Aahimsa, a community of girls and women dedicated to making a life of peace free of the brutality and aggression of outsiders, and its prospering Manuhome, are suddenly victims of a brutal surprise attack by the forces of The World Federation of City States. Mabon and Nora are in hiding outside the city where they witness all the horrors of the assault. Adam, their adoptive son, is no longer with them, having been placed under the protection of Doctor Ueland at the Manuhome.

Bone Beds of the Badlands transports readers to the heart of dinosaur country in the most gripping and terrifying Dylan Maples Adventure yet! Dylan and his best friends, Terry, the Bomb, and Rhett, have won first place in the National Science Fair for their amazing mechanical T-rex. The prize: a parent-free trip to one of the coolest places on Earth-the badlands of Alberta, home to ancient dinosaur remains and a landscape that looks like the surface of an alien planet. Unfortunately, it is also the scene of a manhunt for a desperate killer.

Just when Dylan Maples is settling down after last summer's trip to Ireland's Eye, the parental units are at it again-planning another family adventure. Only this time, it's not a summer vacation, but an extended trip way up north to Cobalt, Ontario, in the middle of a bitter winter. Once a thriving silver mining community, all that's left of the town's rich history are the long abandoned mines. A Toronto millionaire has hired Dylan's dad to retrieve a fortune in silver allegedly stolen from his grandfather back in the early part of the twentieth century.

Nova Scotia-born Will R. Bird miraculously survived the First World War and returned to Nova Scotia. Determined to tell the stories of the brave soldiers who served, Bird became one of the most prolific authors on the subject, completing both fiction and non-fiction works. For nearly two decades following the war, Bird published war stories in magazines and periodicals, which have now gone out of print and were never digitized, and the stories had long fallen into obscurity-until now.

Uprooted, longing for love and to feel somehow situated, Willa Jackson flees life as a military wife when she meets Hugh, the lighthouse keeper on McNabs Island in Halifax Harbour. The object of her fantasies, a musician, he's the last of a dying breed in this story set during the final days of lightkeeping before automation. Romanced by this magical location-so close to the city and its lively communities, yet so remote-she involves her ten-year-old son, Alex, in her escape.

When Emily and her family move back to Nova Scotia from Calgary, it is a return to the coastal landscape that already haunts her-and the waters where her father died. She meets her neighbour Linda, a gruff but loving widow and Linda's grown son, Tom, who struggles to stay on an even keel. As they settle in, Emily and her husband, Daniel, learn more about the short but turbulent history of the house they've just bought.

After a vicious storm aboard ship, fourteen-year-old Caleb is tossed into the Atlantic Ocean. Frightened and alone, he finds himself nudged awake. He's been recovered by one of Sable Island's legendary wild stallions and is given shelter by a mysterious stranger, Norse, who is secretly living on the island. As Caleb recovers and gets to know his strange rescuer, learning the art of scrimshaw, storytelling, and survival, he wonders how he'll manage to remain on the island he's come to love.

Surviving the Halifax Explosion is one thing, but how do Lucy Caines and her wayward husband, Harry, a couple who lose everything to the event's horrors, make peace with their grief? Rebuilding on the rustic shores of Halifax's Northwest Arm, steps from where the shaft of Mont Blanc's anchor lands that fateful day in 1917. But coping with the disappearance on that day of their infant daughter, they descend into an isolating denial: Lucy through guilt and reticence, and Harry through drinking and gambling.

Vintage Margaret Atwood meets Patricia Highsmith in this slyly seductive debut set on an eerily beautiful farm teeming with secrets. The drought has discontented the bees. Soil dries into sand; honeycomb stiffens into wax. But Cynthia knows how to breathe life back into her farm: offer it as an artists' colony with free room, board, and "life experience" in exchange for backbreaking labour. Silvia, a wide-eyed graduate and would-be poet, and Ibrahim, a painter distracted by constant inspiration, are drawn to Cynthia's offer, and soon, to each other.