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Two childhood friends, Maggie and Elizabeth, are irrevocably joined by their love for one man lost on the Southern Cross, a brother to one and a groom-to-be of the other. Lives of families come into focus against the background of the island of Newfoundland, taking readers on a journey beginning more than a century ago and continuing to the 1970s.
The lost vessel becomes a ghostly presence along the rugged shores of Newfoundland during a torturous wait for news, a lingering disruption in people’s lives that brings no relief. A loss comes for which the church offers solace, the graveyard none. Motivated by her family connection to the disappearance of the Southern Cross and its 174 sealers during the March 1914 voyage to the icefields, the author stitches together the lives of women and men cut from strong, enduring fabrics.
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When his dad decides to hire a German prisoner-of-war to help out on their New Brunswick farm, thirteen-year-old Warren Webb is pretty sure the family is doomed. Who invites a Nazi to sleep under their roof? But Martin is not the German Warren expected. After his early attempts to get rid of Martin fail, Warren takes his dead brother Pete's advice and finds himself learning more from his enemy than he ever expected. Soon Martin, a promising track-and-field athlete before the war, is coaching Warren for his provincial summer games race. And when a trio of local bullies threatens their lives, Warren and Martin are forced to rely on each other like never before.
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It's Newfoundland, 1986. Fourteen-year-old Bun O'Keefe has lived a solitary life in an unsafe, unsanitary house. Her mother is a compulsive hoarder, and Bun has had little contact with the outside world. What she's learned about life comes from the random books and old VHS tapes that she finds in the boxes and bags her mother brings home. Bun and her mother rarely talk, so when Bun's mother tells Bun to leave one day, she does. Through her experiences with her new roommates, and their sometimes tragic revelations, Bun learns that the world extends beyond the walls of her mother's house and discovers the joy of being part of a new family--a family of friends who care.
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Fourteen-year-old Michael struggles to adjust to his new life after his parents are killed in an automobile accident and he is sent to live with relatives in a city hundreds of miles away.
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Set in Newfoundland, One for Sorrow chronicles a pivotal year in the life of Issy Heffernan, one of the most complex and appealing young heroines in YA fiction. Saddled with a mean and bedridden mother; an older, increasingly bitter schoolmarm of a sister; and a lovely but mainly absent father, Issy dreams of leaving her miserable life behind for a life on the mainland, maybe even in a big city such as Toronto.What reason is there for her to stay? But there's one thing holding her back: Issy is illiterate. She can't read at all and never could. How far can she really go?
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Visually impaired and abandoned by her parents, Cammie Turple was raised by her tenacious bootlegging aunt in rural Tanner, Nova Scotia. After Cammie and her best friend, Evelyn Merry, destroy the local moonshine still, forcing Evelyn's alcoholic father to sober up but nearly killing Evelyn in the process, Cammie convinces her aunt to send her to the Halifax School for the Blind. 'Cammie Takes Flight' finds Cammie navigating life at her new school, armed with an envelope with her estranged mother's address on it. Unsure if she can trust her new friend, Nessa, Cammie enlists her help in tracking her mother down.
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Willa Jaffrey is beautiful, rich, dating the perfect guy and determined to have a fabulous senior year. Enter Keegan Fraser, a handsome new student who wants no part of the games everyone plays at Willa's school. Despite a rocky start, Keegan and Willa gradually become closer, even as Willa's carefully constructed universe begins to fall apart. But little does Willa know that Keegan's past holds the darkest of secrets and it's about to catch up to him.
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Coping with the recent death of his father, twelve-year-old Jacob Mosher is sent to spend the summer with his aging, estranged (and strange!) grandparents in rural Newport Landing, Nova Scotia
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To the outside world, Robin is a girl that has it all. Why then does she find herself slumped in front of the TV, night after night, watching reruns of her famous mom's show? It doesn't make sense to anyone, least of all Robin. Looking for answers, Robin travels to Port Minton, Nova Scotia, her mom's home town, finally finding answers to some long hidden family secrets.
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Anne, an eleven-year-old orphan, is sent by mistake to live with a lonely, middle-aged brother and sister on a Prince Edward Island farm and proceeds to make an indelible impression on everyone around her.
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Fourteen-year-old Lucy Maud Montgomery-- Maud to her friends-- has a dream: to go to college and become a writer, just like her idol, Louisa May Alcott. But living with her grandparents on Prince Edward Island, she worries that this dream will never come true. Her grandfather has strong opinions about a woman's place in the world, and they do not include spending good money on college. Luckily, she has a teacher to believe in her, and good friends to support her, including Nate, the Baptist minister's stepson and the smartest boy in the class. But life changes for Maud when she goes out West to live with her father and his new wife and daughter. Her new home offers her another chance at love, as well as attending school, but tensions increase as Maud discovers her stepmother's plans for her, which threaten Maud's future-- and her happiness forever.
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This prequel to Anne of Green Gables describes Anne's difficult pre-Green-Gables childhood. That time includes the deaths of her parents, her subsequent life with the Thomas and later the Hammond families, and her time in an orphanage.
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Miriam's family should be rich. After all, her grandfather was the co-creator of smash-hit comics series The TomorrowMen. But he sold his rights to the series to his co-creator in the 1960s for practically nothing, and now that's what Miriam has: practically nothing. And practically nothing to look forward to either-how can she afford college when her family can barely keep a roof above their heads? As if she didn't have enough to worry about, Miriam's life gets much more complicated when a cute boy shows up in town ... and turns out to be the grandson of the man who defrauded Miriam's grandfather, and heir to the TomorrowMen fortune
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The Burbidge family have each other, and after being abandoned by their father and the illness of their mother, their bond is stronger than ever. After their mother dies, Jesse, Pru, and their younger brother and sister struggle to keep her death a secret from noisy neighbours and the law so they can stay together. An unexpected return further complicates things and ultimately results in a showdown between Jesse and the RCMP, leaving the Burbidge children to decide who they can and cannot trust.
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Gaffer is a surreal, haunting novel of a young man tied to a place, but able to explore the depths of the sea and swim freely across the tides of time. Living in a dying outpost town and haunted by the memory of his father's death aboard the doomed Ocean Ranger, Gaffer is obsessively drawn to the sea. Miraculously, he is transformed into a fish-like creature capable of taking to the ocean, where he experiences episodes from Newfoundland's past, and is granted a dark vision of its future.
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When the 1992 cod moratorium forces her father out of a job, the tension between Kit and her father grows. Forced to leave their rural community, the family moves to the city, where they live with Uncle Iggy, a widower with problems of his own. Immediately pegged as a "baygirl," Kit struggles to fit in, but longstanding trust issues threaten to hold her back when a boy named Elliot expresses an interest in her.
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To help her widowed mother make ends meet in 1932, Alma, who loves books and hopes to be a writer one day, takes a job transcribing letters for an eccentric and reclusive elderly neighbor who, she soon suspects, is actually her favorite author.
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When Sarah reluctantly agrees to tag along with her parents for a weekend at her grandmothers cottage on Northumberland Strait in New Brunswick, she has no idea that the people and nature she encounters will forever change her life.
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Tinker Gordon doesn’t want anything to change. He thinks that if he holds on tightly enough, his family, his tiny Cape Breton Island community, his very world will stay exactly the way it has always been. But explosions large and small—a world away, in the Middle East, in the land of opportunity in western Canada, and in his own home in Falkirk Cove—threaten to turn everything Tinker has ever known upside down. Set variously in the heart of rural Cape Breton, on the war-torn streets of Aleppo and in a Turkish refugee camp, in the new wild west frontier of the Alberta oil patch, and in a tiny apartment in downtown Toronto, Tinker’s family, friends, and neighbours new and old must find a way to make it home.
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In the wake of a family tragedy, twelve-year-old Minn Hotchkiss is sent to spend the summer with her sour grandmother in the tiny seaside town of Boulder Basin, Nova Scotia. Almost as soon as she arrives, Minn discovers the skull of a human child on the beach. She is swiftly caught up in a mystery that reaches back more than a century, to the aftermath of the most tragic shipwreck in Maritime history before the Titanic.
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When heavy November rains threaten to flood the small town of Black River, New Brunswick, the community calls on the hydroelectric company to open the gates of its dam and drop the water level. But local management has been overruled by their parent company and ordered to keep it closed. It's got some people hinting it's time they took things into their own hands. Seventeen-year-old Stanton Frame is caught in between: his father is manager at the dam but his girlfriend, Jessica, has joined an environmental group that's taken an interest in the matter. With just hours until the town floods, things come to a violent clash between police and protesters. The next morning the dam has been sabotaged, Jessica is missing, and Stanton has more questions than answers
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Life as a fourteen-year-old in Western Shore, Nova Scotia is pretty simple in 1958. Jonah and his best friend, Beaz, go to school, ride their bicycles, and daydream about the treasure they will one day find on the forbidden Oak Island. But when Jonah and Beaz start to explore the island, they become involved in a frightening mystery.
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A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. This novel is a story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister.
Newfoundland and Labrador Days : historic notes, oddities, recipes daily diary and calendar for any year by 
Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador : a unique collection of language and lore by 
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Explosion in Halifax Harbour : The Illustrated Account of a Disaster That shook the World by Watch these short videos to get a sense of some of the accents and phrases distinct to the Atlantic provinces. Recall these accents as you read your book to get a sense of how the book's characters might sound.