This December in Kilbane, if you're planning to warm up with a cuppa tea at Naomi's Bistro, you may have a bit of a wait—the entire O'Sullivan brood has gone off to West Cork to spend the holidays with brother James's fiancée Elise's family, including her grandfather, the famous orchestral conductor Enda Elliot. Siobhán is so happy for James and Elise, but she's also quietly disappointed that she must put her own wedding to fellow garda Macdara Flannery on hold. Mac will have to join them later, so he can spend part of the holidays with his mam. When the O'Sullivans learn everyone will choose a name from a hat to buy a music-related Christmas gift for someone else at the gathering, it seems like their greatest concern—until the cantankerous conductor is discovered crushed under a ninety-pound harp in a local concert hall. With the extended family—including Enda's much-younger new wife Leah, a virtuoso violinist—suspected in his murder, it's up to Siobhán to ensure the guilty party faces the music. But as a snowstorm strands both families in a lavish farmhouse on a cliff, Siobhán had better pick up the tempo before the killer orchestrates another untimely demise...

Astonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral. Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Now, drawing on the story of his own great-aunt, Watson explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central "uses" for a woman in that time and place: sex and marriage. From the highly erotic world of nature around her to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the country doctor who befriends her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, Miss Jane Chisolm and her world are anything but barren. The potency and implacable cruelty of nature, as well as its beauty, is a trademark of Watson's fiction. In Miss Jane, the author brings to life a hard, unromantic past that is tinged with the sadness of unattainable loves, yet shot through with a transcendent beauty. Jane Chisolm's irrepressible vitality and generous spirit give her the strength to live her life as she pleases in spite of the limitations that others, and her own body, would place on her. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.

A bold, heartfelt tale of life at Green Gables ... before Anne: A marvelously entertaining and moving historical novel, set in rural Prince Edward Island in the nineteenth century, that imagines the young life of spinster Marilla Cuthbert, and the choices that will open her life to the possibility of heartbreak'and unimaginable greatness. Plucky and ambitious, Marilla Cuthbert is thirteen years old when her world is turned upside down. Her beloved mother dies in childbirth, and Marilla suddenly must bear the responsibilities of a farm wife: cooking, sewing, keeping house, and overseeing the day-to-day life of Green Gables with her brother, Matthew and father, Hugh. In Avonlea'a small, tight-knit farming town on a remote island'life holds few options for farm girls. Her one connection to the wider world is Aunt Elizabeth "Izzy" Johnson, her mother's sister, who managed to escape from Avonlea to the bustling city of St. Catharines. An opinionated spinster, Aunt Izzy's talent as a seamstress has allowed her to build a thriving business and make her own way in the world. Emboldened by her aunt, Marilla dares to venture beyond the safety of Green Gables and discovers new friends and new opportunities. Joining the Ladies Aid Society, she raises funds for an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity in nearby Nova Scotia that secretly serves as a way station for runaway slaves from America. Her budding romance with John Blythe, the charming son of a neighbor, offers her a possibility of future happiness'Marilla is in no rush to trade one farm life for another. She soon finds herself caught up in the dangerous work of politics, and abolition'jeopardizing all she cherishes, including her bond with her dearest John Blythe. Now Marilla must face a reckoning between her dreams of making a difference in the wider world and the small-town reality of life at Green Gables.

On the cusp of summer, 1986, Rowan Brockman's mother asks if he can come home to Septimus in the Western Australian Wheatbelt to help with the harvest. Rowan's brother Albert, the natural heir to the farm, has died, and Rowan's dad's health is failing. Although he longs to, there is no way that Rowan can refuse his mother's request as she prepares the farm for sale. This is the story of the final harvest - the story of a young man in a place he doesn't want to be, being given one last chance to make peace before the past, and those he has loved, disappear. 'Locust Summer is about a final harvest, but it's so much more. Few novels have such quiet authority and insight into pasts and futures, nostalgia and grief.' TONI JORDAN 'Authentic, true, and moving - this book made me want to hug my kids, my wife, my parents, and never let them go. This writer will break your heart and fix it again, all within a paragraph.

The A List edition of Leo McKay’s superb collection. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Like This takes you inside small-town Nova Scotia to expose the troubles that lie at its heart. Set in a fictional town called Albion Mines, (the old name for author Leo McKay's home town of Stellarton), Like This offers a gripping, and at times frightening, look at small-town Nova Scotia life. These superb stories are startling and often disturbing, filled with complexity and power. McKay portrays characters with astonishing depth and dead-on emotional rightness. The world is not fair in these stories. There is pain, abuse, solitude; but somehow there is also hope. Featuring a new introduction by Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Lynn Coady.

Un médecin de la campagne irlandaise est un récit charmant et captivant qui fascinera les lecteurs dès la première page — et les laissera avec l’envie de visiter la campagne irlandaise des jours passés… Barry Laverty, M. D., a toutes les peines du monde à trouver le village de Ballybucklebo en Irlande du Nord sur une carte géographique quand il se met en route pour y chercher un emploi rémunérateur. Cependant, Barry saute sur l’occasion d’occuper un poste d’assistant dans un tout petit cabinet médical de campagne. Du moins, jusqu’à ce qu’il fasse la connaissance du docteur Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. Le médecin plus âgé a sa propre façon de faire les choses. Au début, Barry n’arrive pas à décider si le pugnace O’Reilly est le plus grand charlatan qu’il n’a jamais rencontré ou le meilleur professeur qu’il pouvait espérer avoir un jour. Par l’entremise d’O’Reilly, Barry a très vite l’occasion de connaître tout le village et ses résidents colorés et attachants ainsi qu’un tas d’autres personnages excentriques qui font de chaque jour une expérience d’apprentissage pour le jeune médecin inexpérimenté. Ballybucklebo est bien loin de Belfast et Barry découvre vite qu’il a encore beaucoup à apprendre sur la vie rurale. Mais avec du courage et de la compassion et seulement une petite pincée de blabla, il en apprendra plus sur la vie — et sur l’amour — qu’il ne l’avait jamais cru quand il était à l’école de médecine.

From the simple setting of his own barbershop, Jayber Crow -- orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William -- recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century. Surrounded by his friends and neighbors, he is both participant and witness as the community attempts to transcend its own decline. And meanwhile, Jayber learns the art of devotion and that a faithful love is its own reward.

A wanderer arrives by chance on Inishbream, a rocky dot in the sea just off the west coast of Ireland. A lover of boats and a strong worker, she soon marries the young owner of her stone cottage. For a time, she does her woman’s work, fishes with her husband, and walks along the shore, imagining Saint Brendan and the invisible world so real to the islanders. Through the winter, she repays Inishbream storytellers with tales of coastal British Columbia, not so very different, after all, from their own. In the spring, the islanders learn that their isolation will end: the government has promised them modern houses on the mainland. The wanderer cannot wait for the migration; she must leave Inishbream and go home alone. In the islanders’ soft dialect and the wanderer’s own tongue, Inishbream conjures relationships between the newcomer and her husband, between the island people, the sea, and the land, and between the coastal landscapes of reality and imagination. In the uneasy peace of partial acceptance, the foreigner grows, changes, and starts to envision her own place in the world. Inishbream is also available in a hand-printed and hand-bound limited edition from Barbarian Press. That Inishbream was chosen for this exclusive private edition attests to the clarity of Theresa Kishkan’s storytelling and the beauty of her writing.

Callie finds herself spending summer break camping near her cousin's house so that Callie's mother can lead a protest against the closure of the small local school, and while there reconciles with her cousin Del.