***THE MIRAMICHI READER'S VERY BEST BOOK AWARDS, NON-FICTION: LONGLIST***As a young woman, the late Ella Manuel left the busy shipping community of Lewisporte, Newfoundland, for the wider world in the 1920s, but eventually returned to the island, as a single mother, to settle in Bonne Bay. An accomplished writer, broadcaster, journalist, advocate for peace, and staunch feminist, Manuel would leave an indelible mark on the culture she documented and celebra...

At the heart of Gros Morne National Park is Bonne Bay with its magnificent landscape, sheltered arms and coves, and abundant marine life. Bonne Bay occupies an important place in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. Long known to Aboriginal peoples, in the mid-1800s it grew rapidly as settlers swarmed in to take advantage of the herring and lobster fishery. Tensions between the competing claims by the French and British were often played out here. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bo...

The dramatic incredible story of the South Coast Disaster of 1929.

In 1856, Paul Du Chaillu ventured into the African jungle in search of a mythic beast, the gorilla. After wild encounters with vicious cannibals, deadly snakes, and tribal kings, Du Chaillu emerged with 20 preserved gorilla skins—two of which were stuffed and brought on tour—and walked smack dab into the biggest scientific debate of the time: Darwin's theory of evolution. Quickly, Du Chaillu's trophies went from objects of wonder to key pieces in an all-out intellectual war. With a wide ra...

From the northern shores of Labrador to the south coast of Newfoundland, there are as many ghost stories as there are bays and inlets. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is rich with tales of ghost ships, mysterious lights, sinister spectres, tokens of impending death, headless pirates and murdered loves. From legends of phantom loggers to stories of possessed teapots, Haunted Shores: True Ghost Stories of Newfoundland and Labrador is an eerie exploration of the phantom-filled nooks...

When Sir John Franklin disappeared into the Arctic in 1845, it was his adventurous wife, Jane Franklin, who kept the search for him alive and, as a result, contributed more to the discovery and mapping of the North than any explorer. A third masterful biography from historian Ken McGoogan, Lady Franklin’s Revenge is the richly documented story of a complex, ambitious Victorian—arguably the greatest woman traveller of the 19th century— and the transformation of a failed expedition ...

More frightening and scary tales from Newfoundland and Labrador.

The province's premier journalist tells the story he was born to write.No journalist has travelled the back roads, hidden vales and fog-soaked coves of Nova Scotia as widely as John DeMont. No writer has spent as much time considering its peculiar warp and weft of humanity, geography and history.The Long Way Home is the summation of DeMont's years of travel, research and thought. It tells the story of what is, from the European view of things, the o...

"The story of the Titanic has been told many times; this one takes a sociological perspective, with the confident, graceful prose of fine fiction." — Wall Street JournalIt has been over one hundred years since the sinking of the passenger liner Titanic in the North Atlantic, yet worldwide fascination with the epic tragedy remains as strong as ever. With Voyagers of the Titanic, Richard Davenport-Hines gives us a magnificent history of the people in...

A line of nervous young women got off a ship in Victoria Harbour in 1862 and had to walk the gauntlet between two rows of jostling, eager men. One girl, proposed to on the spot, accepted equally quickly and left town with her new husband. Why did these women leave everything behind in England and come to the west coast? The answers lie in the lusty turmoil of a gold-rush frontier, the horrible disruptions of industrial England and the conflicting aims of earnest Christians and early Britis...

This book unmasks one of the greatest human interest stories in Canadian history: the emigration of tens of thousands of children from Britain, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, to become home children in Canada. Through first-hand accounts and archived materials, Corbett sensitively and accurately records the pilgrimage of the children who, against great odds, proved that Canada was the promised land. Today Barnardo Children and their descendants are legion, and they are counted amo...

Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shape...