Kirjahaku

A new smaller format of Lesley Crewe's second novel, now with a reader's guide and author interview.The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie's banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery.Shoot Me is a story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are. Bestselling author Lesley Crewe has created a mixed-up, frantic, ultimately lovable East Coast family. But as Aunt Hildy would say, "Life is not something that needs to be tamed. It's messy. Always was, always will be."

Traditions, created, and subverted. Love, nurtured and destroyed. Friendships, marriages, and the wild beauty of Cape Breton Island. And above all, kin, in all its convoluted forms.In Kin, bestselling author Lesley Crewe traces the tangled lines of loyalty, tragedy, joy, and love through three generations of families. Beginning with Annie Macdonald, an effervescent seven-year-old living in Glace Bay in the 1930s, and ending with Annie's great-niece Hilary, an idealistic twenty-year-old in Round Island in 2000, the story is complex and riveting. The cast of characters is vast and varied-some with the island's deliciously cutting wit, some dour and uptight, some frail, some resilient, and all inextricably bound by their shared histories.Brimming with humour and poignancy, Kin is a celebration of the heartbreaking, maddening joy that is family.

Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn't trade her life for anything, but at thirty she's starting to feel like something's missing.Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie's doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie's peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined.Lesley Crewe's funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton-style humour. Filled with heartache without succumbing to it, Relative Happiness is the story of life and love in a small town, of four sisters who love, betray, and rescue each other in turn, and of Lexie Ivy's joyful awakening. To be released as a feature film in 2015.

Can you really move forward without putting the past to rest?Grace Willingdon has everything she needs. For fifteen years she's lived in a trailer overlooking Bras d'Or Lakes in postcard-perfect Baddeck, Cape Breton, with Fletcher Parsons, a giant teddy bear who's not even her husband. But Grace's blissful life is rudely interrupted when her estranged son calls from New York City, worried about his teenaged daughter.Before she knows it, Grace finds herself the temporary guardian of her self-absorbed, city-slicker granddaughter, Melissa. Trapped between a past she's been struggling to resolve and a present that keeps her on her toes, Grace decides to finally tell her story. Either the truth will absolve her, or cost her everything.Crackling with Lesley Crewe's celebrated wit and humour, Amazing Grace is a heartfelt tale of enduring love and forgiveness, and the deep roots of family.

In a Cape Breton family of black sheep, Mary is pure as the driven snow. She is patient and kind with her alcoholic grandmother and volatile mother, loyal and attentive to her spoiled cousin, and pleasant and polite all day as a grocery cashier. Her well-­off aunt, the only other normal person in the family, wants to help her more, but Mary's mother is too prickly and proud. So Mary goes to work, comes home, takes care of her family, and wonders if there'll ever be more to life.When a young couple moves into the apartment upstairs, it sparks a series of changes that leads to major family revelations, and Mary discovers that sometimes doing the wrong thing is the exact right thing to do.Tender, authentic, and crackling with Lesley's irrepressible humour, Mary, Mary is a book for anyone who's ever had a family--good, bad, or a messy mix of both.

For the first time, bestselling novelist, columnist, and humorist Lesley Crewe's finest newspaper columns are collected in one place.Not merely razor sharp, Crewe's wit is also ocean wide, taking in everything from the humiliations of breast pumping to the indignities of aging, from the frantic excess of holiday preparations to the homey irritations of a long marriage.As precise in her observations as Jane Austen and as fractious on occasion as Oscar the Grouch, Crewe also has a sweet, tender centre, taking us from a hearty laugh to a good cry in a single paragraph. Readers will relate to Crewe's ache at missing her mom, her nostalgia for her childhood, her frustrations at raising teenagers, and her impatience for terrible parking lot etiquette in equal measure. The book spans sixteen years' worth of columns for The Cape Bretoner Magazine, Cahoots Magazine, and The Chronicle Herald. Are You Kidding Me? is a side-splitting, heartwarming, Cape Breton-flavoured celebration of the little things.

After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don’t know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime—from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.

The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie's banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery. Shoot Me is a story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are. Bestselling author Lesley Crewe has created a mixed-up, frantic, ultimately lovable East Coast family. But as Aunt Hildy would say, "Life is not something that needs to be tamed. It's messy. Always was, always will be."

From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret--a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved. Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It's been ten years since she's set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton--back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O'Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left. Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs--even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.

Globe & Mail bestselling Lesley Crewe's new novel brings readers to 1960s Montreal & features a nosy would-be child detective searching for the truth about her mother. It's 1967 in Montreal, the Expo is in full swing, and Audrey Parker has just moved with her dad to Notre-Dame-de-Gr ce, a whole new neighbourhood full of different kinds of people to spy on. Audrey is a lot of things: articulate, disarming, forthright. And, as her father reminds her often, indecently nosy. Audrey scribbles every observation down in her notebooks -- from which foods her new teacher eats for lunch, to how blue the water is in Greece, to what time the one-legged man across the street gets home. She is certain she will soon root out a murderer or uncover a mystery. But there's only one mystery that really matters to her: her mother. Who was she? How did she die? Why won't her father ever talk about her? Over a year of Audrey's life, we bike with her through the streets of NDG, encountering stray animals, free-range kids, and adults both viciously cruel and wonderful. And we walk with Audrey across the threshold from childhood to adolescence, where she will discover the truth about her mother. Balancing humour and sadness as expertly as ever, author Lesley Crewe -- who has so often captured Cape Breton perfectly on the page -- turns her incisive observations for the first time to the NDG of the 1960s, where she grew up.

I Kid You Not is a follow-up to bestselling author Lesley Crewe's first hit column-and-essay collection, Are You Kidding Me? Here Lesley is hilarious and insightful as ever, giving us her take on everything from hockey to wildlife to the ache of missing our ancestors in ninety essays. She shares details of her proposal for the Mere Mortal Awards (Best Director goes to the "poor, long-suffering volunteer who organizes the parking lot at the Legion during the annual county fair"), whether she's used the pandemic as an opportunity to write more ("Piss off and leave me alone. I have a family-sized bag of M&M's to finish"), and what it's like to live with anxiety ("I'd much rather say I have the collywobbles or jim-jams.")Threaded throughout the book is the thrum of delight and deep love Lesley feels at becoming a grandmother to "baby blueberry" in early 2020.Lesley's columns have brought joy to readers for decades-I Kid You Not will ensure that joy sustains for decades to come.

Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they're all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda's philandering husband's Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who's actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they'd expected. A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda's husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda's husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe's Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.

Beloved and bestselling Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe's novels are now available in bright and bold, smaller-format editions. Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn't trade her life for anything, but at thirty she's starting to feel like something's missing. Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie's doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie's peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined. Lesley Crewe's funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton-style humour. Filled with heartache without succumbing to it, Relative Happiness is the story of life and love in a small town, of four sisters who love, betray, and rescue each other in turn, and of Lexie Ivy's joyful awakening.

Beloved and bestselling Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe's novels are now available in bright and bold, smaller-format editions. Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

Globe & Mail bestselling Lesley Crewe's new novel follows a mystery author with writer's block from 1950s Montreal to rural Cape Breton, in search of much more than her next big story. On paper, Kitty's life is perfect. She lives in Montreal, so vibrant in the 1950s; she married her childhood sweetheart, who happens to also be a handsome movie star; and her detective novels, written under a plausibly male nom de plume, are bestsellers. But Kitty is suffocating under the truth of her life: Montreal feels chaotic and lonely without her mother, and with her father all but estranged. Her husband is a glib Lothario. And she never, ever wants to write another detective novel. When she says as much to her publishers, they panic. She's their golden goose. And so they convince her to go on a writing retreat to a beautiful remote island, Cape Breton, where with solitude and a luxurious change of scenery, she'll be able to whip up her next book. At least, that was the plan. Kitty arrives in Cape Breton to a leaky, drafty shack and a cast of characters unlike anyone she's ever met. There's Edith, who listens in on everyone's party line calls and never keeps good gossip to herself; generous Bertha and her enormous family...and Bertha's son, Wallace -- Walrus, to all his nieces and nephews. A gentle giant who always has half a dozen children hanging off him. Soon Kitty's writing retreat turns her life upside down, and she has to face which parts of her life are non-negotiable and which she must cut loose. Can she preserve what she loves in Montreal now that Cape Breton is calling? If she frees herself from the weight of her past, will she float away altogether? From Globe and Mail--bestselling author Lesley Crewe comes a story of loneliness and belonging, and a love letter to the women who have always kept the kettles warm and the neighbours fed in rural Cape Breton.

Well, Dick's dead. Now what?Margo, his widow, is trying to dodge the tsunami of paperwork and other tasks coming her way. She doesn't deal with details-why do you think she was married in the first place? Dick always handled the drudgery. Not terribly well, it turns out.Margo's ex-husband (the first one, not the dead one) and their two adult children are trying to support Margo-who seems to be finally entering adulthood at the tender age of sixty-two. Dead Dick's ex-wife and their daughter consider Margo a maneater, so the funeral is a nightmare. Life in New Brunswick lately is a tornado of siblings, children, pets, marriages, health issues, and endless bureaucracy.And at the centre of it all is Margo, living alone for the very first time, going back to work as a drugstore cashier to make ends meet, and trying to endure everyone else's judgements about the woman she is when she barely knows herself.How old do you have to be to come of age?...and has anyone seen Dick's will?With humour and heart, national bestseller Lesley Crewe walks readers through the incredibly disruptive domino effects of the death of one unremarkable man-and the evolution of the flibbertigibbet wife he's left behind.

A stunning new work of historical fiction from the bestselling author of The Spoon Stealer, set on Nova Scotia's remote Scatarie Island, following three friends whose lives are inextricably bound, and the spirit who guides them. Scatarie Island belongs to the living and the dead and readers will be surprised to know that the story is related to them by a spirit who feels that they have the same right to tell this story as anyone. Christmas Day, 1922: three babies are born on Scatarie Island, off the coast of Cape Breton. Although born to different parents, Hardy, Sam, and Mary Alice grow up together in their wild homeplace, exploring the rocky coastline, picking bakeapples, and scavenging treasures from the countless ships that have wrecked there over the centuries. But change is lapping at the shores of this isolated island, the Second World War the biggest change of all. One friend leaves to fight, one tends the light, and one struggles to understand how a place where wealth is measured in fish and family can possibly survive this outmigration. Only one of them knows about Cara - a girl who was shipwrecked on the island's shores a hundred years earlier, emigrating from Ireland. A girl who fell in love with the windswept grasses and salt-scrubbed air and tight community of Scatarie, and remains as a spirit. A girl who keeps watch, everywhere from the rugged island to the blood-soaked beaches of France, nudging the three friends towards their destinies. Part ghost story, part romance, part history, and a stirring tribute to young soldiers and their brave war brides, The Spirit of Scatarie is an epic tale with whispering island winds at its heart.