2020 “The Very Best!” Book Awards: Best Fiction!

Fiction is undoubtedly the largest genre that gets reviewed here, so it was extremely difficult to narrow down the longlist to the shortlist, then to just three. Here are the three winners in the Fiction category! GOLD: The Tender Birds by Carole Giangrande (Inanna Publishing) SILVER: Lay Figures by Mark Blagrave (Nimbus Publishing) BRONZE: Some …

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2020 “The Very Best!” Book Awards: Best Non-Fiction

This year’s non-fiction finalists are a mix of a travelogue, a personal battle with PTSD and loss, and finding gratitude despite facing adversity. GOLD: Silver Linings by Janice Landry (Pottersfield Press) SILVER: Around The World In A Dugout Canoe by John M. MacFarlane and Lynn J. Salmon (Harbour Publishing) BRONZE: A Medic’s Mind by Matthew …

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2020 “The Very Best!” Book Awards: Best Short Fiction Winners!

For 2019, there were only two short fiction books in this particular category, so we declared it a tie. This year, we were blessed with some of the best and imaginative short fiction to choose from. It is difficult to narrow down the shortlist of five titles to three. GOLD: Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin (Astoria, …

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2020: “The Very Best!” First Book Winners!

The “Best First Book” award goes to the first published book by an author. It can be either fiction or non-fiction. In their book, the author has demonstrated that their debut book is not a “one-off”. Indeed, the writing should be so good that the reader is eagerly anticipating their next effort. Here are the …

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2020 “The Very Best!” Poetry Winners!

2020 was the first year that The Miramichi Reader started reviewing poetry on a regular basis, therefore this is also the first year that we are giving out “The Very Best!” Book Awards in this category. While all of this year’s winners hail from Atlantic Canada, there is so much great poetry being written all …

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Announcing the Complete 2020 “The Very Best!” Book Awards Shortlist!

The 2020 reading year was a little different this year at The Miramichi Reader. For the first part of the year, it contained reviews written by myself with the occasional guest post. Then, at the beginning of 2020, I made the major decision to expand the scope of the site beyond Eastern Canada, but in …

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Narrow Cradle: Poems by Wade Kearley

In Narrow Cradle, Wade Kearley explores the midlife encounter with mortality and the ways we strive to resist, deny, cheat, and even bargain with it. Grounded in both traditional and modern poetic forms, these poems find in the transience of life a new kind of freedom, a rebirth independent of personal circumstance. In crisp, direct, …

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Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley by Chad Norman

What if the lady — Jane Austen’s contemporary –who conceived the world’s most intriguing modern monster (Doc Frankenstein’s creature) — was also a proto-suffragette, precursor-feminist, and, simultaneously, much to her chagrin, wedded to a narcissist poet, whose liberalism urged on his libertinism?