[Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from the Crossfield Publishing book, Old Broad Road by Phyllis L. Humby. It is reproduced here with her permission. – James]
Sylvia Kramer flees two thousand miles from home and switches out her Jimmy Choos for rubber boots. She stubbornly adapts to the unique culture and dialect of Newfoundland embracing diverse friends and east coast delicacies.…
Jael Richardson’s debut novel, Gutter Child (2021, HarperCollins Canada)* is a forceful one that shines a spotlight on racism, colonization and the struggle to get out from under an imposed debt that only death will bring freedom from. It is a work of creative fiction that strongly resonates in the age of Black Lives Matter and other Black activist issues.
Set in an imaginary world (an apartheid state, not unlike South Africa) where the colonizers have pushed the Indigenous tribes so far back from the coast that they eventually revolt, but lose the war.…
Peg Tittle is a prolific author, and not just in one genre either. She has published everything from creative fiction to articles in journals and magazines to textbooks. She’s even done some stand-up comedy! She has a definite style when it comes to her books and stories and it is one I quite enjoy reading, even if I don’t always find myself agreeing with her viewpoint.…
Blaze Island opens with a Category Five hurricane off one of Newfoundland’s most northern Islands, a ferry ride from Gander. Rain and wind batter the Island and the home of Milan Wells and his daughter. A disturbance from the front door finds a young man, soaked and unconscious.
Catherine Bush tells us a story of the climate changes that threaten the world as we know it.…
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!
Here is the category that many have been waiting for! It’s the most popular category at The Miramichi Reader and as usual, there were many, many good titles and to try and narrow the fourteen titles on the longlist down to just seven was an unenviable task. Here, then are the seven “Best Fiction” titles of 2020:
Of the above seven titles, three will be awarded either gold, silver, or bronze award early in September 2020.…
Best First Book (Fiction or Non-Fiction)
Best First Book is one of the more interesting categories: I’m always wondering if the author has another book in them anytime soon, or was this just a one-off experience? What will their second book be like? The authors in this shortlist represent a wide assortment of backgrounds. All but one are female and there’s only one non-fiction book here.…
When I asked mom where babies come from she said Regina. I believe. So I spent my childhood thinking every birth occurred in the capital of Saskatchewan. This, combined with the expression people are Saskatchewan’s primary export, and it was years before I knew any better. So when author Ron Stansfield said he’s from Regina, part of me thought, well, who isn’t?…
My introduction to sci-fi was The Muppet Show, Pigs in Space launching me into the genre. What followed were Star Wars and Buck Rogers – anything, really, with a John Williams or Queen soundtrack. I realize that doesn’t much whittle it down. Later in life, I became a Trekker, and still refuse to choose between Kirk and Picard.
More to the point, here’s what I like about Pedestal, Gareth Mitton’s first novel – futuristic, dystopian science fiction.…
the introduction to Rising Tides, Sandilands states that climate change stories “focus increasingly on thornier questions of persistence, adaptation, resistance, and renewal” instead of apocalypse. Ultimately, the short fiction, poetry and personal climate testimonies in this climate change anthology are about hope.
“The way rain falls the spring of life seed to root, stem to leaves. Oh trees, weather maker, life shaper, air sweet.…
it is almost the end of 2019 (and another decade slips away), I thought it would be interesting to look back at some of the most popular posts here at The Miramichi Reader for 2019. While many 2018 posts continued to be popular in 2019, the following ten posts were all posted in 2019. Included are author interviews, short story collections, poetry, fiction and nonfiction selections which just happens to cover all the major categories here.…
What a reading year it has been! I actually tried to read less this year, in an attempt to concentrate more on reading books more deliberately hoping to write a better review. I’m not sure how successful that was, but by being more “choosy” about what I read (and the books I select and agree to read) I was able to concentrate more fully on some great titles from 2018/2019.…
Over the few short years of its existence as an imprint of Baraka Books, QC Fiction has now produced nine titles, with a tenth one in the works. Looking back over this diverse catalogue, it would be easy to compare them to snowflakes (no two are alike) or the proverbial sampler box of chocolates. However, I have come to think of QC Fiction as a major league baseball pitcher who has a number of different pitches in his repertoire.…
I believe I may have found a new “favourite” writer in Dian Day. I recently read her new book The Madrigal (clicking the link will take you to another site) and I was very impressed by it. It was an intriguing read about the life of Frederick, the seventh son (all the other six were twins) and the issues he had to deal with growing up and some that haunted him up to his adult life.…
While Carol Bruneau’s award-winning 2017 book of short stories, A Bird on Every Tree was excellent and well received (“Her exceptional prose reveals how much there is to discover in the every day” raved Publishersweekly.com), it merely whetted our appetites for one of her full-length works like Glass Voices (2007) or These Good Hands (2015). The wait is over for Nimbus Publishing has released A Circle on the Surface.…
