What do you get when you mix a celebrity jewel thief with the Halifax Explosion, and then throw in a few tales of family secrets, Haligonian oddities and bike-bound hijinks? Well, you end up with this: The Coast’s end-of-year list of the best books written by local authors in 2024.
Last year’s book roundup went so well, we had to double it. (And draw the boundaries around Halifax, for good measure.) This year’s roundup includes 12 offerings ranging from heartfelt memoirs to short-story collections to wacky whodunits.
Below, we’ve got you covered with a list of local books you need to read from 2024, in the order they were released:
1 Charlene Carr’s We Rip the World Apart (HarperCollins, January 30, 2024)
Twenty-four-year-old Kareela is caught in limbo: Half-Black, half-white, she feels neither. Born in Halifax to a Jamaican father and Nova Scotian mother, she’s already wrestling with her place in the world when she finds out she’s pregnant. And then, her brother Antony is murdered by the police. In the aftermath of his death, Kareela’s paternal grandmother moves in, giving Kareela a link to her Jamaican roots.
Carr’s second major-imprint release after 2023’s Hold My Girl—she has also self-published nine novels—We Rip the World Apart follows three generations of women and their secrets and “reveals the ways that simple choices, made in the heat of the moment and with the best of intentions, can have deep and lasting repercussions—especially when people stay silent.”
2 Martin Bauman’s Hell of a Ride (Pottersfield Press, February 21, 2024)
Okay, there’s some favouritism here. But can you fault us? Winner of the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Coast reporter Martin Bauman’s Hell of a Ride tells the story of a 7,000-kilometre solo bicycle trek across Canada. It was a ride that came in the wake of his father’s sudden depression, his cousin’s suicide and the stirring-up of his own buried childhood memories. Completed in 2016, Martin raised more than $10,000 for mental health initiatives from the ride. He had billed it as a mission to encourage people—men, especially—to talk about depression. It was ironic, he concedes in the book, that he was so reluctant to talk about his own.
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EXCERPT: Martin Bauman’s Hell of a Ride wades into depression, family legacy and cycling across Canada
A spiritual successor to the bicycle-bound escapades of Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders, Bauman’s book takes its readers on a journey from the rain-slicked streets of Vancouver, British Columbia, to the hills of St. John’s, Newfoundland. There are couch-surfing swingers. Pot-smoking Maritimers. Runaway army veterans and Kiwi empty-nesters. There is also plenty of heart—and humour—on offer, turning a book about trauma recovery into a page-turner you can smile about, too.
3 Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child (Goose Lane Editions, March 19, 2024)
Dartmouth’s Elaine McCluskey has a sharp pen and a sharper wit. “You go through life convinced you’re going to get diabetes like your old man and one day you choke to death on chicken gristle, and the autopsy shows your blood sugars were perfect,” she writes in her Alistair MacLeod Prize-winning book Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, a collection of short stories set in the Maritimes. Her latest novel—McCluskey’s seventh—starts with a man disappearing into the fog, a giant tuna head in his bicycle basket like E.T. And it only gets wilder from there. Set between Dartmouth and the fictional fishing village of Pollock Passage, Nova Scotia, McCluskey’s The Gift Child weaves together a tale of petty criminals, undercover cops, family ghosts and a narcissistic ex-TV presenter.
Best to leave it at that, lest anything else be spoiled. “To explain the plot of Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child is both to give everything away and to reveal nothing important,” Quill & Quire’s Rohan Maitzen writes. Like a bike disappearing into fog, though, you can bet it’s a wild ride.
4 Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog (ECW Press, April 9, 2024)
The first seeds of Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog, a psychological horror about schoolmarm Ada Byrd’s unravelling in Edwardian England, were planted when the debut novelist read a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
“She has a reputation of writing fiction that’s very frothy and very light and very wholesome,” Gish told The Coast in April. “But the comparison between that reputation and the life that she actually led, which was full of crises of faith, a very difficult marriage, and drug addiction and issues with their children … I found that really, really interesting. Just because it’s so significant to the difference between what was expected of women of her time—the public face that women were expected to put forth—and their actual inner lives.”
That “stiff upper lip” social attitude sparked an idea in Gish’s mind:
“What if I had that sort of late-Victorian, early-Edwardian archetype of the spinster schoolmarm and really explored those feelings of what it’s like to be somebody who was almost left behind by a society that doesn’t really appreciate anything that a single woman has to offer? How badly would that mess with your head?”
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Halifax author Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog will play with your mind
In Grey Dog, Gish weaves a story of traumatic memory, of women’s suppression and the things that linger at the margins of our subconscious. The novel—imagine if the Brontë sisters read Stephen King—is like a simmering pot or a mind fraying at the edges: What starts seemingly small can balloon quickly. The end result is both a feat as well as a literary treat: A tale that can pull you along through its prose while something deep and harrowing builds, waiting for its reveal.
5 Carol Bruneau’s Threshold (Nimbus Publishing, April 30, 2024)
Dubbed “one of the finest writers this country has produced” by the Miramichi Reader, Carol Bruneau can do it all: A two-time winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (Purple for Sky and A Circle on the Surface), the Haligonian has authored 11 books from short-fiction to non-fiction and had her work translated into German. In Threshold, a collection of short stories—set, for the most part, in the Maritimes—Bruneau explores “the hypocrises and contradictions of a world broken by racism, homelessness and climate change.” A woman transforms when she’s pushed into a raging river. A Haligonian couple can’t seem to get enough of Naples, despite its first impression as a “circle of hell.” Another woman keeps seeing the ghost of her mother when she’s out in public.
The 15 stories range from a few pages to lengthy chapters, and include “This Talk of Trees,” a story based on the 2022 girdling of trees in the Halifax Public Gardens. In it, Bruneau imagines a jilted lover carving the trunks out of jealousy of his girlfriend’s enjoyment of the gardens: “I knew then I was being made a fool of, you understand, And I had no recourse but to do the very least that my abilities warranted.”
6 Aaron Williams’s The Last Logging Show (Harbour Publishing, May 4, 2024)
Speaking of trees… A third-generation logger, Aaron Williams spent his teenage and early-twenties summers in Haida Gwaii, stacking lumber, felling tall trees and hearing his family’s even taller tales about the early days “in the bush.” In The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era, the British Columbian-turned-Haligonian author takes his reader behind the scenes of a contentious industry that—depending who you ask—has both made and unmade Canada, turning its vast reserves of forest into fortune while spurring several of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Williams’s book is both a tale of an old-growth industry approaching its last days, as well as an interrogation of family ties and generational divides. What does it mean to inherit a complicated legacy? What happens to the lumberjack when all the lumber is gone? And what happens to our forests?
7 RC Shaw’s Captain Solitude (Goose Lane Editions, May 21, 2024)
How about another bicycle voyage? A follow-up to the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award-nominated Louisbourg or Bust, RC Shaw’s Captain Solitude is a rollicking tale of a Nova Scotian icon—and a damn fun adventure of its own, too. Shaw sets out from his home in Cow Bay to trace the footsteps of famed sailor Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single-handedly around the world. Armed with a Magic 8 Ball, a tombstone-shaped surfboard and a bicycle that weighed “substantially north of a hundred pounds,” the 44-year-old surfer-turned-author seeks out the help of mystics, marooned sailors and magic mushrooms in his search for clues about Slocum’s life and disappearance. The quest takes him along Nova Scotia’s South Shore through deserted beaches, bug-bitten bogs and powerful storms to Slocum’s boyhood home on Brier Island. It’ll make you want to get on a bicycle and roam around Nova Scotia, too.
8 Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief (HarperCollins, June 4, 2024)
Called a “master of narrative nonfiction” by Esquire, King’s College journalism professor Dean Jobb loves a true crime story. His book Empire of Deception, the chronicle of 1920s Chicago con artist Leo Koretz, was named Book of the Year by both the National Post and Globe and Mail, and Publisher’s Weekly hailed its precursor, about a globetrotting Victorian-era serial killer (The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream), as a “masterpiece.” In A Gentleman and a Thief, Jobb turns his sharp focus to 1920s-era jewel thief Arthur Barry, a man who befriended New York’s elite—Barry rubbed shoulders with Harry Houdini and the Prince of Wales—while simultaneously “planning audacious heists to relieve them of their treasures.” In a seven-year span, Jobb writes, Barry stole nearly $60 million worth of diamonds, pearls and other gems.
A former investigative reporter with the Chronicle Herald, Jobb—pronounced “jobe,” not “job”—still has razor-sharp instincts for finding a story. He describes himself as an author “drawn to overlooked or forgotten stories—hidden gems from the attics of history.”
9 Donna Jones Alward’s When the World Fell Silent (One More Chapter, August 1, 2024)
Since 2006, Donna Jones Alward has enchanted readers with romance novels that have chronicled happy endings. But the New York Times bestselling author’s latest book, When the World Fell Silent, is her first foray into the historical-fiction genre. Set in the lead-up to, during and in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion, the book chronicles two fictional characters (and several real ones) as they navigate life in Halifax circa 1917 and the very real role that thousands of women played in the relief efforts after the city’s most notorious disaster.
“The story is really about what happens after the explosion for them, the decisions they make and how they rebuild,” Jones Alward told The Coast earlier this year. “Nobody was really the same after that happened.”
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New book When the World Fell Silent confirms women have always been doing it all
10 David Huebert’s Oil People (Penguin Random House, August 20, 2024)
David Huebert is a master of the short story: His debut collection, 2017’s Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, and his follow-up, 2021’s Chemical Valley, won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize. In Oil People—the Halifax author’s debut novel—Huebert pens a tale that is “part generational saga, part eco-gothic fable.” Set in southwestern Ontario, the novel follows two generations of the fictional Armbruster family: Jade is 13 years old, living in 1987 on her family’s oil farm as her parents wrestle over whether to sell the past-its-prime property, while her ancestor Clyde catches “his big break” in 1862, striking oil—and becoming rich—but suffering unexpected trade-offs, including “alarming, otherworldly visions.”
11 Steven Laffoley’s What’s the Point? (Pottersfield Press, September 15, 2024)
Halifax author Steven Laffoley has spent more than 30 years wandering along Point Pleasant Park’s many paths. He has weathered Mother Nature’s blows, including “brushes with voracious horned beetles and the harrying of howling hurricanes.” He has run its trails “in the sweltering heat of August,” braved “knee-high snow” in January and—in one instance—“inadvertently set himself adrift, shirtless and howling like a Viking, on its surprisingly fast-moving ice floes during a rare invasion of bergs in the harbour.”
But despite Laffoley’s frequent trips to the park—and Point Pleasant’s fame among Haligonians—the Atlantic Book Award-winning author realized he knew little about it. Enter What’s the Point? An Irreverent Guide to Point Pleasant Park, Laffoley’s ode to the beloved park and its oddities. (“On my best days in the park, I still [get] lost after taking a few wrong turns along the labyrinthine paths,” he writes.) Like any good walk in the park, Laffoley’s book is full of curiosity and wonder—and enough good humour to keep you from getting lost, even when you venture off-path.
12 Lynn Gallant Blackburn’s For the Love of My Sister (Tellwent Talent, November 21, 2024)
Nineteen years ago, elementary teacher Paula Gallant was found murdered. It was two days after Christmas. Her family found her body in the trunk of her car, parked at the school where she taught Grade 3. The discovery shocked all of Halifax. Despite her family’s suspicions, it took RCMP four and a half years to arrest Gallant’s husband, who admitted to strangling her in an argument over a gambling debt.
In her new book For the Love of My Sister, Paula Gallant’s oldest sister Lynn recalls in poignant and vivid detail the weeks and months leading up to and after her sister’s murder. She also writes about the decades-long battle for politicians and police to heed advocates’ calls to address a province-wide epidemic of gender-based violence.
“There’s still a lot of change to be done, and when I look at the recommendations that I made 17 years ago, they are still recommendations that are being made today,” Lynn told The Coast in a recent interview. “I really had hoped that the Mass Casualty Commission report would draw enough attention that our politicians would finally care.”
—With files from Martin Bauman and Julie Lawrence
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.