2007 Atlantic Book Awards Shortlist

Best Atlantic Published Book

Winner! East Coast Rug Hooking Designs: New Patterns from an Old Tradition
by Deanne Fitzpatrick
Nimbus Publishing

East Coast Rug-Hooking Designs is filled with over thirty patterns of coastal-inspired hooked mats, each pattern accompanied by the stories that inspired them. The designs range from those suitable for beginners to those that will challenge the experienced hooker. Each design includes basic instructions, a pattern to copy, a list of necessary supplies, rug-hooking tips, a story about the design, and a photograph of the finished hooked rug.

The Full Palette
by Bruno Bobak, edited by Bernard Riordon
Goose Lane Editions

Bronislaw Josephus “Bruno” Bobak discovered art in weekend classes organized by Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer at the Art Gallery of Toronto (later the Art Gallery of Ontario). He went on to become Canada’s youngest Official War Artist. Following that, he held leading positions at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and at the UNB Art Centre in Fredericton. His figurative paintings are known for their bold expressionism and large scale. In six essays by curators and artists, with beautiful reproductions of his work, Bobak’s art and life leap from the page.

Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate
by David Folster
Goose Lane Editions

Family-owned entrepreneurial businesses have driven the Atlantic Canadian economy for well over a century. They’ve also defined the culture of this region. Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate illustrates the Ganong company’s beginnings in 1873, when James and Gilbert Ganong opened a tiny grocery store in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Since then, five generations of the family have maintained Ganong’s specialty in making sweets, but also in advertising, package design and more. Gorgeous photos and insightful text let readers feast on this story.

Booksellers’ Choice Award

Winner! The Birth House
by Ami McKay
Knopf

There’s great import to the birth of Dora Rare. She’s the first female born to the family in five generations. Dora’s life continues to be charged as she befriends and studies under the spirited Acadian midwife, Miss Babineau. Soon the still-young but brash medical establishment – in the guise of Dr. Gilbert Thomas – confronts them and their work in Scots Bay, Nova Scotia. A death casts suspicion on the midwives, and the community divides behind and against. With historic and well-researched detail, as well as an appreciation for the political, this narrative brings the past in full dimension to the present.

The Custodian of Paradise
by Wayne Johnston
Knopf

Who wouldn’t want to follow Wayne Johnston on his return to the literary territory first explored in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams? Of course this time the quick-witted and cutting Sheilagh Fielding leads the way. The journey leads to deeper and further isolation and solitude, a state in which Fielding immerses herself. So much the better to tell her story of being abandoned as a child and burned by love as a young woman – all the while followed, and cared for, by her mysterious Provider.

The Friends of Meager Fortune
by David Adams Richards
Doubleday

Ah brothers. Often so close and yet so far apart. It takes a novelist of David Adams Richards’ calibre to unravel the mystery of this sibling relationship and to do so within the confines of a compelling story. Will and Owen Jameson grow up in the Miramichi, the sons of a logging kingpin. The elder Will inherits the father’s love of labour and his toughness, but also his fate. The younger Owen looks inward and escapes into books. After the fall of the father and the first son, it’s up to Owen to define the family legacy and to redefine himself.

Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction

Winner! Scotch River
by Linda Little
Penguin

A cowboy comes home to the Maritimes after his rodeo partner dies. With no one and nothing to hold on to, Cass Hutt gives up the riding and ranch life out West to follow a mysterious land deed back to Scotch River, Nova Scotia. Once he’s back, sketchy boyhood memories slowly resolve and Cass is faced with an unforgettable cast of characters bound together by the mysteries of blood and the burdens of memory.

Reparations
by Stephen Kimber
HarperCollins

This is a gutsy first novel that meets head on an unresolved issue in Nova Scotia: Africville. The book opens with the trial of a young black man who, while working for the municipal government, steals government money in the name of reparations for the shattered community. The presiding judge and the defence attorney in the case both share a connection to Africville’s fate – razed by the city in the ’60s – and to each other. As they wade through decades of political manipulations and social strife, both lawyer and judge confront their intertwined pasts.

The View from a Kite
by Maureen Hull
Nimbus Publishing

Exceptional character and circumstance combine in this debut novel. Teenaged Gwen is the thoughtful and observant storyteller illuminating life inside one of the last tuberculosis sanatoriums in Nova Scotia during the 1970s. The hospital’s surroundings, fellow patients, and the disease’s manifestations (her research notes are interspersed throughout) all come clear. So does the wry humour about her own escapades–a fling on a stairwell and a drunken escape to a party in town. And so too the glimpses into a violent and dark past.

Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction

Winner! A Race for Real Sailors
by Keith McLaren
Douglas & McIntyre

The anticipation, pressure and thrill of each and every International Fisherman’s Cup race – it ran from 1920 to 1938 – enlivens these pages. It was a forty-mile ocean course that battered and bruised every ship. Along with much else, national pride was on the line every time. As many reviewers have noted, McLaren writes with the firsthand knowledge of a sailor and the skill of a storyteller (for many, that’s one and the same).

A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia
by M. Brook Taylor
Goose Lane Editions

This book provides a lens on the importance of the camera as storyteller in the early 20th century and on a transformative period – when unassisted sail was in its decline – in the fishery off Nova Scotia. Brook Taylor’s text captures the detail, voices and concerns of the day. It places you on the pitching and rolling decks of ships, thanks to well-stocked black-and-white documentary-style pictures of journalist and commercial artist Frederick William Wallace. (This includes an amazing action shot from the bow of the Dorothy M. Smart crashing through the seas in the Bay of Fundy in March 1912).

Causeway: A Passage from Innocence
by Linden MacIntyre
HarperCollins

Fifty-five years ago this year, the Canso Causeway connecting Cape Breton Island and the Nova Scotia mainland was completed. For a tiny village this was massive change. The transformation was also deeply personal as veteran CBC TV journalist Linden MacIntyre shows in this evocative memoir. Suddenly he could imagine catching up with his father, Dan Rory, who was always away. Just as quickly, he could imagine crossing himself, leaving behind people like his Gaelic-speaking grandmother, Peigeag, who may or may not have been able to cure or curse you. Added to the clarity of MacIntyre’s memory and appreciation for character is a sharp sense of humour.

Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration

Winner! Skunks for Breakfast
by Lesley Choyce, Illustrated by Brenda Jones
Nimbus Publishing

Everything about Pamela’s family and life is normal until the skunks arrive, and arrive. Then suddenly everything about her life, and her family, stinks. But Pamela takes heart, then action with her father, trying their darndest to get rid of the smelly pests, one after the other after the other.

Brenda Jones depicts the change in Pamela’s character, her reluctant warming to the unexpectedly cute creatures and her father’s helplessness in the face of such an odorous onslaught. Born and raised in PEI, she now works as an illustrator, commercial designer and film animator in Montreal. She has illustrated a dozen books, including Lobster in My Pocket and Mr. Sweetums Wears Pink.

The Happily Ever After
by Sharon Jennings, Illustrated by Ron Lightburn
Annick Press

What a great reminder: birthdays are for wishes and the imagination. On his birthday, a little boy pictures a room full of treasure. Our hero thus goes on a quest to get a cut of the cake before the party starts. Along the way, he’ll have to outwit ferocious dragons, endure distant exile, and outrace the most formidable guardians of them all: his parents. His journey unfolds in an icing-coloured wonder.

P is for Puffin
by Janet Skirving, illustrated by Odell Archibald
Sleeping Bear Press

The unique visual and spoken language of Newfoundland and Labrador is celebrated in this collaboration by illustrator Odell Archibald and author Janet Skirving. Archibald makes a painting for each letter in the alphabet. Archibald’s work is colourful, detailed and textured. These unforgettable scenes combine with thoughtful text from Skirving, perfect for anyone and everyone who’s visited – or wants to visit – the beloved Rock

Margaret and John Savage First Book Award

Winner! Steam Lion: A Biography of Samuel Cunard
by John G. Langley
Nimbus Publishing

This is the first full-length biography of Halifax born-and-bred Samuel Cunard. The shipping magnate was a mover and shaker in the 19th century world of international trade. His influence endures as the Cunard Line of ocean liners continues to dominate the seas. (In 2004, the massive Queen Mary II was launched.) John G. Langley covers the growth of the company and the other commercial and social concerns of this historic figure.

A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia
by M. Brook Taylor
Goose Lane Editions

This book provides a lens on the importance of the camera as storyteller in the early 20th century and on a transformative period – when unassisted sail was in its decline – in the fishery off Nova Scotia. Brook Taylor’s text captures the detail, voices and concerns of the day. It places you on the pitching and rolling decks of ships, thanks to well-stocked black-and-white documentary-style pictures of journalist and commercial artist Frederick William Wallace. (This includes an amazing action shot from the bow of the Dorothy M. Smart crashing through the seas in the Bay of Fundy in March 1912).

The Watermelon Social
by Elaine McCluskey
Gaspereau Press

The usual suburban tropes fade away in Elaine McCluskey’s debut collection of ten stories. Nothing TV-sinister happens in these pages; instead there are depths for the reader to plumb in every story. McCluskey renders the stillness and quiet of suburban communities in note-perfect style, the same result she achieves when she writes of children – from their points of view. Without relying on place names, there’s something essentially Atlantic in these stories.