Michelle Brunet

The title of Mike Parker’s latest book may be slightly misleading. Yes, there is a smattering of the supernatural, but it really delves into a subject perhaps more intriguing: baffling island culture now extinct on many of the 30 or so Nova Scotia isles Parker explores. For instance, readers learn of Percy Morris who was […]

Steven Laffoley allows readers to imagine so easily as his own imagination, inspired by true events, soars through the pages of The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. He reopens a cold case circa 1896 and questions whether a guilty verdict was based on truth or mass hysteria. Laffoley follows a gory crime scene upon […]

A writer’s craft is always evolving—even for an author who has penned over 50 books. Ten years after publishing Cold Clear Morning, Lesley Choyce re-immersed himself into the manuscript to release a new revised edition. “It was a series of setbacks in my own life that suggested there may be more to Taylor’s story,” said […]

Fourteen years ago, The Mi’kmaq Anthology was published. Elder Rita Joe, poet laureate of the Mi’kmaq people, known for poems such as “I Lost my Talk” and “Five Hundred Years,” approached Lesley Choyce with the idea of inspiring Mi’kmaq writers and compiling their works to form the collection. When Theresa Meuse heard of Joe’s passing […]

It’s been about eight months since Dr. Michael Ungar released his first novel and so far, the profusion of online feedback has mostly come from human service professionals. Simply put, whether you are a social worker or a milkman, grew up in foster care or lived a sheltered life, you have to read The Social […]

Is the medium the message? With Ian Williams’ Not Anyone’s Anything, it could be. The three times three stories are experimentally told using musical notations, flashcards and simultaneous narratives broken up by horizontal or vertical striations. At times, readers are taken out of their comfort zones as if they are witnessing Williams’ brainstorming sessions—but this […]

The beginning of Island of Wings may seem like a cross between a Harlequin romance and Hitchcock’s The Birds. However, once over the minor speed bump, readers experience Karin Altenberg’s beautifully raw voice. Her poetic prose describes the Scottish archipelago St. Kilda, a treeless land where natives live communally in thatch-covered tunnels and survive off […]