2008 Shortlist, Atlantic Book Awards
Best Atlantic Published Book
by Jacques Poitras
Goose Lane Editions
The very public battle over the ownership of millions of dollars worth of paintings at Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery has had all the makings of best-selling pulp fiction—money, aristocracy, sex, family laundry, and court intrigue. It’s a story that might have appeared on the front pages published by its protagonist, press baron Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook.
In this fascinating account, Jacques Poitras explores the intertwined history of the Aitken family and the Beaverbrook Gallery. A Shattered Legacy underscores the sea-change that has occurred between the gallery’s founding—when Beaverbrook could command obedience and obsequiousness from his fellow New Brunswickers—and today, when heirs joust with an independent and proud public institution.
by Judith Meyrick, illustrated by Richard Rudnicki
Nimbus Publishing
Gracie has an idyllic life in Halifax’s Public Gardens. What delicious treats to savour from visitors to the park – muffins, popcorn, peanut butter sandwiches. Gracie loves the attention, the visitors, but especially, Gracie loves the food. Suddenly, Gracie’s favourite people stop bringing treats. Why won’t they share their lunch? Aren’t they worried she’ll starve? Despite best efforts, Gracie is reduced to…well…duck food. And despite herself…she starts to enjoy it. Gracie, The Public Gardens Duck is the funny and sweet saga of one hungry duck in search of supper.
by Tom Smart
Goose Lane Editions
Miller Gore Brittain (1912-1968) had an unerring sense of structure and composition. In the early ‘30s, at the Art Students’ League in New York, he experienced the pivotal moment in American art: the shift from traditional to abstract expressionism. When he returned to Canada, the Group of Seven still defined Canadian art, and he burst upon the scene with emotion-filled drawings and paintings of the human form. Later, combining figures and abstraction, he explored the limits of the body and the borderlands of sanity to express the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. World War II interrupted Brittain’s career and on his bombing missions he carried William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience with him. Blake’s poems, particularly ‘The Tyger,’ proved a pervasive motif of Brittain’s later work.
Booksellers' Choice Award
by Jacques Poitras
Goose Lane Editions
The very public battle over the ownership of millions of dollars worth of paintings at Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery has had all the makings of best-selling pulp fiction—money, aristocracy, sex, family laundry, and court intrigue. It’s a story that might have appeared on the front pages published by its protagonist, press baron Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook.
In this fascinating account, Jacques Poitras explores the intertwined history of the Aitken family and the Beaverbrook Gallery. A Shattered Legacy underscores the sea-change that has occurred between the gallery’s founding—when Beaverbrook could command obedience and obsequiousness from his fellow New Brunswickers—and today, when heirs joust with an independent and proud public institution.
by Steven Laffoley
Pottersfield Press
Hunting Halifax begins as good ghost stories should, in an old city cemetery with author Laffoley pondering a black hole in Halifax history, a stretch between 1843 when the old burying place was closed, and 1857 when a monument to the Crimea was erected there. This was a time of tectonic shift between the agrarian and the industrial ages that had resonance for an author at the shift between industrial and digital ages. Had ghosts from this earlier historic black hole affected the present day? As the investigation of murder and mystery unfolds, Steven discovers the ghosts of the past haunt the present in unexpected ways.
by Harvey Sawler
Nimbus Publishing
Twenty-first Century Irvings explores the modern family business, the powerful players behind its continuing success, and the myths that are spread about the wealthy Irving empire. Author Harvey Sawler exposes the truths behind the myths, and predicts the transformation of the family, in similar fashion to the Rockefeller and the Morgan families, from industrialists to philanthropists. A business story, a family story, and a Maritime story, this is a book that will fascinate all who are affected by the Irving empire.
2008 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction
by Beatrice MacNeil
Key Porter Books
It is 1939. England has declared war on Germany, and Canada will march beside her. Soon the lives of five young friends living in rugged, pristine Cape Breton will be changed forever. Fiddler Benny Doucet, prospective med student Calum MacPherson, and fisherman Hector MacDonald all decide to enlist. But Calum's handicapped brother Hamish is stuck at home, while Alex MacGregor, in love with the postmistress, hides in his mother's attic. The fate of these devoted friends, during and after the war, hinges on forces beyond their control in this lyrical, vibrant novel.
by Carol Bruneau
Cormorant Books
When giving up is not an option, what enables a person to go on after suffering great loss? 71 year-old Lucie Caines’ husband suffers a severe stroke that makes her re-examine her complicated relationship with the man she has both loved and loathed. From 1917, when their first home is destroyed in the Halifax Explosion and Lucy loses her first child, to the social tumult of the 60s, Glass Voices twists through time. There’s bootlegging, illegal fishing, pickles bubbling on the stove, men landing on the moon and, as Lucy examines her past, she changes her present. Her ability to cope with tragedy, her quiet strength – despite the pain and sorrow – is inspiring
by David Doucette
Cape Breton University Press
The Curtis kids “slunk through life as half-starved coyotes,” three boys and silent daughter Grace, in a small cold, wood-frame house perched between ocean and mountain in a remote Cape Breton Depression community. Frank, the youngest, has to try harder, learn faster, stretch further: a near-fatal hunting accident in adolescence highlights Frank’s inner and outer strengths. Fate, and Frank’s fortitude, propel him from the shadows of his rural home to the spotlight of the world stage, and, eventually, back home to Ingonish.
2008 Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction
by Marq de Villiers
Thomas Allen & Son
Witch in the Wind is a fascinating journey into the backstory of a remarkable vessel. She was a superb boat that emerged from a long boatbuilding tradition where skilled tradesmen built many wonderful vessels, and she was skippered by a skilled sailor at a time flush with some of the most accomplished sailors in the world. De Villiers explores everything from the behind-the-scenes drama of her construction, to her hardscrabble existence as a fishing vessel, to her breathtaking races at a time when a shift was happening and a way of life, fast disappearing.
by Stewart Donovan
Cape Breton University Press
Born of Gaelic-speaking Scots living on the shores of the Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, R. J. (Roderick Joseph) MacSween grew up in conditions of poverty and hardship. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest and recruited to teach at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, where he established the first creative writing course in a Canadian university. He founded The Antigonish Review, and influenced the careers of such writers as Alistair MacLeod, Sheldon Currie and Linden MacIntyre, as well as thousands of students from several generations. ‘The Forgotten World’ is a literary biography that examines the life and work of this relatively unknown, enigmatic and gifted man from Cape Breton.
by A. B. J Johnston
Cape Breton University Press
The story of what happened at the colonial fortified town of Louisbourg between 1749 and 1758 is one of the great dramas of the history of Canada, indeed of North America. The French stronghold on Cape Breton Island, strategically situated near the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, was, from soon after its founding, a major possession in the quest for empire. The dramatic military and social history of this short-lived and significant fortress, seaport, and community, and the citizens who made it their home, are woven together in A. J. B. Johnston’s gripping biography of the colony’s final decade, presented from both French and British perspectives. Endgame 1758 is a tale of two empires in collision on the shores of mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic Canada, where rival European visions of predominance clashed headlong with each other and with the region’s Aboriginal peoples. The magnitude of the struggle and of its uncertain outcome coloured the lives of Louisbourg’s inhabitants and the nearly thirty thousand combatants arrayed against it. The entire history comes to life in a tale of what turned out to be the first major British victory in the Seven Years’ War. How and why the French colony ended the way it did, not just in June and July 1758, but over the decade that preceded the siege, is a little-known and compelling story.
2008 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration
by Judith Meyrick, illustrated by Richard Rudnicki
Nimbus Publishing
Gracie has an idyllic life in Halifax’s Public Gardens. What delicious treats to savour from visitors to the park – muffins, popcorn, peanut butter sandwiches. Gracie loves the attention, the visitors, but especially, Gracie loves the food. Suddenly, Gracie’s favourite people stop bringing treats. Why won’t they share their lunch? Aren’t they worried she’ll starve? Despite best efforts, Gracie is reduced to…well…duck food. And despite herself…she starts to enjoy it. Gracie, The Public Gardens Duck is the funny and sweet saga of one hungry duck in search of supper.
by Susan Pynn, Illustrated by Nancy Keating
Tuckamore Books
Laura Lou promises Mom and Dad that if only she can have a puppy, he will have perfect manners. Oops…chubby and cuddly, he’s puddling on the floor. Puppy likes snacking on houseplants, splashing out of the tub and sliding down the hall. Laura Lou knows that it's up to her. Together, they learn how to change a little bundle of eager invention into a perfectly mannered member of the family....well, almost.
by Michael Harris, Illustrated by Eric Orchard
Nimbus Publishing
Emily believes in magic—the magic of the moon, of the animals she talks to, and of her lovely old town, Lunenburg. She also believes in the magic of the Friendly Forest, but she’s worried that it might not be enough to stop the owner of the new whatzit factory from chopping down the trees she loves so much. Will all the forest’s animals, a little stardust and a lot of courage be enough to save the Friendly Forest, just in time for Christmas?
2008 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
by Stephanie Domet
Invisible Publishing
Leah is haunted. By the things she's done, by the things she should have done, and by the ghost of her brother. She has to learn to let go of the past if she, or her brother, are ever going to move on. A funny, urban love story, Homing is about a woman who's grown afraid of the outdoors, a ghost that's lost its way, a musician who's trying to find his, and Sandy and Harold, a pair of homing pigeons that help bring it all back home.
by Fred Armstrong
Jesperson Publishing
On a snowy winter night, Gerry Adamson hides from his family in a laid-up sailboat. Pushing sixty, holed-up with a laptop, he’s trying to make a novel from thirty-odd years of compromises and betrayals that have seen him progress from youthful erratic passion to late-middle-aged dithering. He’s making one last effort to have it mean something.
by Bob Mersereau
Goose Lane Editions
From a nation that invented Trivial Pursuit and is renowned for inveterate list-making, The Top 100 Canadian Albums was a book that needed to be written. Polling more than 500 musicians, music industry insiders and journalists, Bob Mersereau has assembled a list that is sure to spark more than a few hundred debates among aficionados. The book features cover reproductions and descriptions for each of the albums that made the list as well as documentary photographs, interviews and fascinating facts. Did you know that Randy Bachman tried to get Trooper to change the name of their 1978 hit to ‘Raise a Little Howl’ because of his religious beliefs? And the top album? Bob’s book is on sale in the lobby.
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