Book Me

Book Me
Book Me

A book lover's journey through CanLit. Join Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird as she chats with the creators behind the top East Coast book releases. Dive into book topics, hear behind-the-scenes stories from authors and get expert recommendations on the best new books for your TBR list. Sponsored by Nimbus Publishing.

  1. The Remembering - Susan Sinnott

    07/18/2023

    The Remembering - Susan Sinnott

    When memory is gone, what is left behind? Award winning author, Susan Sinnott, joins us from her home in Newfoundland to chat about her recent novel, The Remembering. The book—which Lindsay gives five enthusiastic stars—follows three generations of Newfoundland women as they navigate the triumphs and difficulties of life and explores how memory—in its many forms—impacts our lives. Susan shares a bit about her writing process and how she creates "mountains of backstory" for her characters, why she chose to explore themes of dementia and memory, what types of books she thinks her characters would read and more.  About The Remembering: Some memories are treasured, re-read like a favourite book. Some are traumatic and won’t stay buried. But memories can be unreliable, can fade and mutate. They affect our actions and choices.Memories of a happy marriage comfort Liz through widowhood, while flashbacks to a devastating sexual assault overwhelm her youngest daughter, Eve. Her middle daughter, Carlie, is building a new life in another country but longing for home is pulling her back, while Ginny, the eldest, takes on everyone?s problems as her own. Eve’s daughter, Rosie, remembers nothing of her absent father and yearns to track him down against her family’s wishes.Then Liz is diagnosed with dementia, and the family’s resilience is tested as the matriarch begins to falter. If life is all memory, what is left when it’s gone?Memory is at the core of all these women’s lives: elusive, intrusive, helpful or misleading. What’s revealed is a story about the struggle to maintain a sense of family, home, and self, amidst all life can throw at you.

    21 min
  2. Some There are Fearless - Becca Babcock

    06/20/2023

    Some There are Fearless - Becca Babcock

    Becca Babcock joins Lindsay to give a behind the scenes glimpse into her writing process and the inspirations behind her compelling and timely new novel, Some There are Fearless. Hear how she drew inspiration from her own experiences coming-of-age in military driven Cold Lake, how she works to craft deeply human characters and immersive settings, and her approach to writing engineering in a way that makes it appealing to all readers. Plus, Lindsay and Becca dive into many of the novel's themes including the complexities of motherhood and its parallels to working with nuclear energy—volatility, managing risk, mitigating disaster, the obsessive need for control and inevitably, powerlessness.   About Some There are Fearless: Jessica Manchaky’s life has been shaped by the threat of nuclear disaster. She’s a child when she hears news of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the disappearance of Ukrainian relatives, growing up on a northern Alberta military base during the Cold War. From that moment on, all she wants is to keep danger at bay.But living in a household with a domineering and volatile mother and a rebellious older brother in isolated Cold Lake, Alberta, Jessica never feels fully safe. When she comes of age, she leaves her suffocating small town for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she meets her future husband and eventually becomes a nuclear engineer in charge of risk assessment and management at nuclear power plants. But even as she shields the world from nuclear disaster, she is constantly facing personal tragedies—like a strained marriage, a misogynistic workplace, and severe postpartum anxiety—that she never quite manages to predict. When her young daughter is afflicted with a mysterious and potentially deadly illness, Jessica must learn to accept that not all risk can be managed.Beginning with the threat of the Cold War and the ripple effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and punctuated by other disasters both natural and manmade, Some There Are Fearless is an intimate and vulnerable exploration of the thin line between control and chaos from the author of the “terrific debut” (Globe and Mail) One Who Has Been Here Before.

    28 min
  3. Jack Scrine - HALIfolks: The Faces and Stories of Halifax

    05/23/2023

    Jack Scrine - HALIfolks: The Faces and Stories of Halifax

    Journalist and Photographer, Jack Scrine, joins Lindsay remotely to chat about his book HALIfolks: The Faces and Stories of Halifax, a compilation of stories and images from his popular blog/social media project of the same name. He shares his inspiration for the project, his tactics for approaching strangers and helping them to open up, the responsibility of being entrusted with people's intimate stories, and how those stories evolve over time. About Halifolks: In the early 2010s, Australian Jack Scrine found himself in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with plenty of travel experience but little more than a camera to his name. As he wandered the city, he started to capture images that documented the eclectic, the unusual, and the everyday lives of the people around him. A fan of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, Scrine realized there were similar stories of love and loss, happiness and sadness, friends and enemies, and embarrassments and triumphs all around him—and Halifolks was born, first as a blog, then as a Facebook page, and now, for the first time, as a book. Featuring 150 captivating colour images of Haligonians, both famous and obscure, Halifolks: The Faces and Stories of Halifax highlights stories that cut to the heart with truth, simplicity, and honesty. It’s not every day we are confronted with questions like: When were you happiest? What is your greatest struggle? What is your biggest regret? The answers can be tragic, uplifting, and even funny—but ultimately, they are always healing.

    30 min

About

A book lover's journey through CanLit. Join Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird as she chats with the creators behind the top East Coast book releases. Dive into book topics, hear behind-the-scenes stories from authors and get expert recommendations on the best new books for your TBR list. Sponsored by Nimbus Publishing.

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