National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the late nineteenth century, after disease and circumstance have left her alone in the world, Mary Rourke believes she is predestined to spinsterhood in her small community in Newfoundland. When a series of dramatic events brings a strange man to her door, Mary emerges from the comfortable isolation that she knows to follow her dreams in Boston. Those desires do not come without sacrifice and hard choices. When her past comes back to haunt her, Mary must decide whether there is room for both her aspirations and her heart—or if she must surrender one to have the other.

A novel of crime and passion in nineteenth-century Newfoundland Alexander Pindikowsky, a Polish artist working in Heart’s Content, is arrested in 1880 for the crime of forgery. He is sentenced to fifteen months at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. Governor John Hawley Glover, when made aware of Pindikowsky’s talent, arranges for the prisoner to serve part of his sentence in a most unusual way—designing and painting ceiling frescoes at Government House. Ellen Dormody, a parlour maid at Government House, witnesses first-hand the brilliance of Alexander’s artistry.

A fascinating and unpredictable dramatic story of John Guy of Bristol.

The banking schooner Marion set sail from St. Jacques, Newfoundland, bound for St. Pierre, the home base of Captain Pierre Maurice, on June 10, 1915. The vessel and crew were never seen again. Many have speculated that the French captain had made good on his threat to end the life of Captain Ike Jones, but it was never proven. The Loss of the Marion tells the story from the point of view of Nellie Myles, whose husband and brother-in-law were lost with fifteen other men.

Day after day, thousands of people passed by an unassuming, three-storey building on the corner of New Gower and Springdale streets in St. John’s. Operated by the Hull family, the ground floor was rented to a commission merchant; the top two floors and annex building were used as a private hospital for aged and infirm patients. In the dead of winter, on February 10, 1948, the simple lighting of a defective oil stove in the main building set off a chain of events that burned the Hull Home and its Annex to the ground. When the smoke cleared, searchers found death in every room and hallway.

A thrilling tale of the notorious pirate Peter Easton.

Clarissa, eleven, has been orphaned by a disease that has kept her far from home for as long as she can remember. Despite the many inmates in Dr. Grenfell’s Children’s Home on Newfoundland’s northern tip, she lives a lonely life. She longs to be able to do something as simple as pushing her feet into boots in a blink and skipping down the road holding hands with Cora, her best friend. Will Clarissa get to go home? If so, what will she discover about her past that will help her understand why she spent her childhood at the orphanage?

Warning: Graphic Content and Mature Subject Matter Rosie O’Dell is a creature of beauty, brilliance . . . and unspeakable secrets. When she was young, terrible crimes had been committed against her. Tom Sharpe became Rosie O’Dell’s high school sweetheart, and in revenge for the transgressions against her, the two young lovers committed their own crime of passion together, which ultimately ripped them apart. Thirty years have now passed since Tom has seen his Rosie O’Dell, and the intervening years have been a source of endless torment for him.

Stories, Tall Tales, and Truths of Newfoundland and Labrador In this diverse collection of stories, Hubert Furey transports the reader back in time to an outport culture in which he lived and which has long since disappeared. It was a time when the “slapper” was deemed to be an indispensable aid to success in the classroom, when homemade moonshine was part of any festive celebration, when fairies abounded in the woods waiting to lead the unwary astray, and when friends sat around the table and didn’t mind having a good argument, even if the subject was as mundane as chuckley pears.

Portland, Maine, 1910. An assembly gathers to listen to a fundraising lecture by the esteemed medical missionary Doctor Wilfred Grenfell. Grenfell has been working for eighteen years with trappers, fishermen, and their families on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula and in coastal Labrador. Thanks in part to the wild adventures recorded in his recent bestseller, Adrift on an Ice Pan, Grenfell is becoming ever more famous in North America. But tonight something is wrong. The man who appears before the audience as “the good doctor” suddenly receives a challenge from the floor.