Books published by Goose Lane Editions

When a mysterious schooner blows into the little town of Kenomee, tongues start wagging. Like the other villagers gathered at the wharf, Hetty Douglas can't help but be fascinated by the Esmeralda and her ragtag crew. Suffocating in a marriage of convenience and tormented by memories of the Halifax Explosion, Hetty falls under the spell of an exotic sailor-woman. So does Noble Matheson, who has seen enough to draw his own conclusions. A compelling story of 20th-century piracy, Rachael Preston's fast-paced novel explores the complex struggle for freedom against a backdrop of passion and repression.

Linda Johns and her husband Mack share their woodland home with a changing gaggle of injured or disabled wild birds and a lively crew of animals. Their living room resembles an indoor forest, with two dead trees providing perches for feathered guests, and their long screened porch is a practice flyway for convalescents. Edna the rabbit lopes through the house with Blossom, the media-savvy hen. Two goats linger expectantly outdoors while Linda and Mack tend their orphaned or wounded feathered guests. Birds of a Feather is a warm and funny account of four seasons in the life of this passionate yet respectful lover of wild creatures, a woman who offers a helping hand to nature's miracles. With exuberant joy, Johns tells about the many birds she has released back into the wild and the few whose disabilities make them permanent family members.

The Trans-Canada Highway winds along the Saint John and Madawaska rivers through New Brunswick and Quebec to the St. Lawrence River. It follows one of the oldest and strategically most important routes in North American history: the Grand Communications Route. For millennia, the Saint John River system had been a major artery in the vast system of lakes, rivers, and portages linking aboriginal communities. During the French and British colonial periods, and until the advent of rail travel in the 1870s, it remained the backbone of an overland route between the Atlantic Ocean and the interior of the continent. Today, the traveller along the Trans-Canada Highway can visit some of the forts that once defended this vital Road to Canada.

For his celebrated poetry collection Saracen Island, David Solway took on the voice of a Greek poet named Andreas Karavis. So artful were these poems that many readers believed they were authentic translations from Greek by Karavis. The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat continues Solway's inspired poetic ruse. In this new book of ostensible translations, he adopts the persona of Karavis's spurned lover, Turkish Cypriot poet Nesmine Rifat. Lushly sexual and sparkling with wit and intelligence, these extraordinary poems take the form of a series of undelivered letters, penned in the wake of Karavis's desertion and eventual marriage to Anna Zoumi. With great subtlety and sensitivity, Solway portrays a powerful woman and gifted poet undergoing a violent emotional journey?from explosive anger and arrogant disdain to bitter melancholy and undying passion.

From the elegiac to the playful, the poems in this seemingly effortless collection shift from a natural refinement to a nearly breathless elegance. How the gods pour tea abounds with departures: words and communities die, trout-lilies and passengers vanish, even the King and Queen of Fairies disappear. Some poems give simple weight to the details of everyday life; others evoke an imaginative world inhabited by giant beavers, elf-thugs, and the great caw-dragon. In poem after poem, there's a powerful imagination at work that blends observation and fancy, passion and playfulness, a hint of philosophy and a whiff of something serious yet spirited. Displaying a dexterity of tone and an understated bravura, Davies writes of the extremities of losing and then awakening "like the robin's egg broken in the grass, its emptiness new in the world."

In 1954, Fred Cogswell and a group of students and faculty associated with The Fiddlehead magazine founded Fiddlehead Poetry Books ?to give the public a chance to read the work of new Canadian poets.? The first volume was Cogswell's own first collection, The Stunted Strong, a sonnet sequence that sets vivid sketches of country people confined by frustration, obsession, and small victories against the illimitable dreams and thwarting limitations of the human condition. This second edition of The Stunted Strong is published to commemorate the life that Fred Cogswell so generously devoted to poetry and its makers. Between 1958, when he became the publisher of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, and 1981, when he retired, he published more than three hundred collections. He launched the careers of Frances Itani, Roo Borson, Joy Kogawa, Marilyn Bowering, Don Gutteridge, and Alden Nowlan, and he published early books by Al Purdy, Norman Levine, Dorothy Livesay, and David Solway. In 1982, Peter Thomas became the new publisher, and, deciding to publish prose as well as poetry, he changed the imprint to Goose Lane Editions.

On day, a hay-covered island materializes offshore, an island populated by -- is it possible? -- fleas. Watched by the lighthouse keeper, the fleas take human form: the ruler, Don l'Orignal, with his moose-antler crown; his brave lieutenants; the doughty charwoman, spy, and rabble-rouser, La Sagouine; and all their friends and relations. Antonine Maillet's provocative and entertaining fantasy pits the clever, uncouth Flea Islanders against the almost as clever but far more civilized villagers. The unexpected outcome holds up a mirror to comical, earthy, and poignant human nature as well as to Acadian history.

In the winter of 1896, young Annie Kempton was brutally murdered. Throat slashed, face beaten, she bled to death on the floor of her family home in Bear River, Nova Scotia. An entire community and a salacious media rose and pointed their finger at one man: Peter Wheeler. According to the newspapers of the day, not only had Peter Wheeler killed Annie Kempton, he had also committed the unforgivable sin of being dark-skinned and foreign-born, a hired hand who had never learned his place. Thanks to a Halifax detective, the self-proclaimed Sherlock Holmes of the Maritimes, Wheeler was strung up in the dead of night. The case was among the first in Canada to introduce forensic science into a courtroom. In a riveting, fast-paced narrative, Komar re-examines the evidence using modern techniques and reveals how Peter Wheeler was the victim of a state-sanctioned lynching, executed for a crime he did not commit. The Lynching of Peter Wheeler is Debra Komar's second book on historic crimes. Her first, The Ballad of Jacob Peck, was met with considerable critical acclaim.

Sheree Fitch's poetry explores the realities of women's lives and the many kinds of shelter women give each other and create for themselves. At all stages of life and love, the women Fitch creates gain strength by sharing their anguish and their joy. As passionate about resilience as she is about suffering, Sheree Fitch carries her famous sense of humour even into life's dark corners. Who else but the creator of Mable Murple could conjure up Diana, the domestic acrobat who transforms her home into a circus, or Eve, the mother of us all, offering child-rearing tips? Women exploring the many meanings of their lives quickly adopted the first edition of In This House Are Many Women as their own. This enlarged volume augments that earlier collection with new poems characterized by strength, insight, and Fitch's irrepressible ebullience.

Meet Precious ? a burned-out, boozy journalist-cum-amateur-sleuth with an embarrassing nickname. He's the hero of Douglas Glover's hilariously suspenseful first novel. A brilliant send-up of the murder mystery genre, Precious was a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1984 and sold out its first and only print run in just one month. Now, mystery lovers and fans of Glover's later fiction can enjoy this witty post-modern detective tale, which The Globe and Mail called ?a jolly Canadian extravaganza.? After three failed marriages and a stint in a Greek jail, Precious Elliott is ready for Dullsville. A job as woman's page editor for the Ockenden Star-Leader seems like just the ticket ?that is, until Rose Oxley, the town gossip, winds up dead with a pair of scissors lodged in her chest. Inviting comparisons with the work of Ross Macdonald and Jasper Fforde, Precious deftly combines a satisfying mystery plot with an ingenious literary parody.

In Fabulous Fabrications from Busted Hockey Gear, hockey-stick wizard Peter Manchester tells how to transform broken sticks and the festering contents of old hockey bags into expressions of creative genius. Make a menagerie, a hockey-pants sling chair, or your very own supermodel. Like music? Start a "stick band" with electric guitars and a rack of helmets. With cartoons, diagrams, and instructions, Fabulous Fabrications is a tinkerer's dream come true.

"I believe my saddle horse knew more than I did . . . He took care of me." The popular image of the Great War is of the trenches, but Jimmie Johnston experienced the triumph of Vimy and the hell of Passchendaele from a saddle. A horse driver in the transport section of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, he hauled machine guns and ammunition to the front lines through shellfire, darkness, driving rain, and suffocating mud.

Sue Sinclair's poetry resonates with the world's lively details and the subtle emotions that whisper at the edges of the everyday. A keen observer of both the seascapes of her native Newfoundland and the cityscapes of Toronto, she captures moments between or after events and preserves the still point when things are most themselves. She registers the weight of being and tries to make peace with the world's mysterious ineffability, with its uncertainty and, most poignantly, with its mutability.

Charmaine Cadeau's intensely imagined poems captivate everyone who experiences them. Delving beneath the gleaming surfaces of satellite dishes, wagon-wheels, rain-barrel planters, and suburban sprawl, she reveals a luminous spirituality. The encroachment that turns rural Ontario into cottage country becomes Cadeau's unsentimental locus of truth and beauty. With skill that even experienced poets seldom possess, Cadeau evokes the intangibility of perception, its flickering contingencies. In What You Used to Wear, Charmaine Cadeau has achieved what all young poets wish for but almost none attain. Her poetry is so impressive that her first book appears unheralded, untested by journal publication, and with few of the other supports usually so essential to first collections. Ross Leckie, Goose Lane's poetry editor and Cadeau's former creative writing professor at the University of New Brunswick, says, "This is very much a surprise book. I threw the manuscript into the mix to fill out packages for the readers, and it kept coming to the top." Anne Simpson, a finalist for the 2003 Governor General's Award for poetry and winner of the 2004 Griffin Prize, eagerly edited the book. With the publication of What You Used to Wear, Goose Lane is proud to launch the first book of a truly remarkable poet.

Meet Tully Stamper, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, and a tippler of corn juice. He is also a modern-day knight errant and one of the world's last innocents. In this hilarious yet bittersweet tale, Tully staggers out of the Florida swamp and into Gomez Gap, a sliver of the Old South turned Hollywood backdrop. From the moment he stumbles into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her flamboyant film-director husband, Otto Osterwalder, we become Tully's co-conspirators, sharing his pain, his optimism, and his wayward wit.

Brent MacLaine's poems are rooted in the history and landscape of his native Prince Edward Island. At the same time, his is a poetry without roots; MacLaine belongs to the first generation that is not farming the land. He has a remarkable ability to graft a rural past to a keen sense of contemporary culture, its urban habits and its popular entertainments, its scientific theories and its technological mythologies. These Fields Were Rivers presents an astonishing range in mood and idea, the poems shaped by the poet's nimble attention to his quotidian world.

One hundred and thirty poets.Hundreds of letters and epistolary poems.An unforgettable journey into the long night of love.

All you need is love. All you get is sex . . . the saying is all too true in the strange private lives revealed in "Greetings from the Vodka Sea."A prim English bride honeymooning beside the Vodka Sea learns first-hand about drinking the water in foreign parts. A naive doctor and his wife diverge in a group sex session masquerading as therapy. A man with a past plots to seduce a deteriorated middle-aged woman who could expose him. Paths cross, whether by accident or by design. Life's randomness is offset by dark comedy, the dream-logic of fantasy, and an eerily familiar synchronicity.

Generations of practical and ingenious Maritimers have given the world great things. Great Maritime Achievers in Science and Technology brings together the accomplishments of more than thirty trail-blazing scientists and inventors. Among these achievers are Rupert Turnbull, whose variable pitch propeller revolutionized flight; Francis Peabody Sharp, Canada's first commercially successful apple breeder; Abraham Gesner, the founder of the modern petroleum industry; and Georgina Fane Pope and Margaret Macdonald, who developed the science of battlefield nursing.

In Eyehill, a town too small to support a high school, men and women work hard to wrest a living from the dry, rolling fields. Their passion for what they hold dear -- the land, their spouses and children, their neighbours -- is tangled with yearning for something different and the dangerous allure of the oil industry. Rhea and Jarvis, one shy, the other wild, grow up conspiring to follow their dreams elsewhere. Rhea leaves and Jarvis stays, but Eyehill ties them more closely than blood or marriage.

Hammering out a coalition almost defines Conservatism. Nowhere is this truer than in New Brunswick, where linguistic, social, and political dualities have foretold the fortunes of the national party. Bernard Lord sought and found the middle ground. Now many federal Conservatives see him as the solution to their dilemma.

As the pink-skinned, fair-haired child of Canadian missionary parents, DANIEL COLEMAN grew up with an ambivalent relationship to the country of his birth. He was clearly different from his Ethiopian playmates, but because he was born there and knew no other home, he was not completely foreign. Like the eucalyptus, a tree imported to Ethiopia from Australia in the late 19th century to solve a firewood shortage, he and his missionary family were naturalized transplants. As "ferenjie, they endlessly negotiated between the culture they brought with them and the culture in which they lived. In "The scent of Eucalyptus, Coleman reflects on his experience of "in-betweenness" amid Ethiopia's violent political upheavals. His intelligent and finely crafted memoir begins in the early 1960s, during the reign of Haile Selassie. It spans the Emperor's dramatic fall from power in 1974, the devastating famines of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, and Mengistu Haile Mariam's brutal 20-year dictatorship. Insightful chapters touch on everything from the riot drills at Coleman's boarding school to the paradoxical taste for luxury he gained as a result of international famine relief efforts.

In April 1775, the first shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired. They reverberated in what later became New Brunswick, when recent immigrants from New England rose in rebellion. The British moved quickly to crush these rebels, and after the war they made the new frontier with the United States secure by settling Loyalist regiments throughout the area. The result of this wave of British American settlers was the establishment of New Brunswick as a separate colony in 1784. The motto of the Loyalists, Spem reduxit -- Latin for "hope restored" -- became the motto of the province they founded. Hope Restored tells the story of the Loyalist regiments that settled New Brunswick, describing their Revolutionary War exploits, the colourful and influential people who came with them to New Brunswick, and the part of their legacy that can be seen today. Hope Restored is the second volume in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.