John Alexander MacNeil is back with another astonishing adventure. The ninety-year-old still lives alone on the blessed isle of Cape Breton. He still sometimes makes tea for his wife, who died decades ago. He accepts his lonely life, ignoring the world changing around him. But one night, he feels his heart stop. After willing himself back to life with sheer stubbornness, John Alex finds Death himself sitting at his kitchen table, perplexed and intrigued by his victim's recovery. What follows is a tale on the edge of reality, full of love, doubt and the inexplicable details of an extraordinary life. Keeping what wits he has about him, John Alex needs to muster all the wisdom and courage he has to protect those around him from the dangers of an ever-changing world and the grim reaper he has come to know. In his 103rd book, acclaimed author of The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil takes the reader through another beautiful adventure about time and love. Lesley Choyce tackles topics like dementia, elder sexuality and assisted dying with humour and grace. John Alexander MacNeil is back with another astonishing adventure. The ninety-year-old still lives alone on the blessed isle of Cape Breton. He still sometimes makes tea for his wife, who died decades ago. He accepts his lonely life, ignoring the world changing around him. But one night, he feels his heart stop. After willing himself back to life with sheer stubbornness, John Alex finds Death himself sitting at his kitchen table, perplexed and intrigued by his victim's recovery. What follows is a tale on the edge of reality, full of love, doubt and the inexplicable details of an extraordinary life. Keeping what wits he has about him, John Alex needs to muster all the wisdom and courage he has to protect those around him from the dangers of an ever-changing world and the grim reaper he has come to know. In his 103rd book, acclaimed author of The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil takes the reader through another beautiful adventure about time and love. Lesley Choyce tackles topics like dementia, elder sexuality and assisted dying with humour and grace.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award! John Alexander MacNeil is eighty years old. Sharp-tongued and quick-witted, he lives alone in rural Cape Breton, but he still cooks breakfast for his wife, who's been dead for thirty years. He silently starts to question his own mind after stopping to pick up a hitchhiker -- a hitchhiker who turns out to be his neighbour's mailbox. Everything shifts, though, when Emily, a pregnant teenager, shows up at his house with no place else to go. Determined to help Emily as best as he can, John must also keep the wolves from his door and maintain some semblance of sanity. The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil is a compelling, witty and heartwarming novel by renowned Nova Scotia author Lesley Choyce.

Winner, Dartmouth Book AwardShortlisted, Atlantic Booksellers Choice AwardA small Canadian island declares its independence to the world and benign anarchy reigns. A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island's inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers' guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce's novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

Lesley Choyce's novella The Summer of Apartment X is a beach book for grownups who remember how they got that way. Fred Winger and his two buddies, Richard and Brian, intend to take the beach resort town by storm. It's the fateful summer between high school and university, early 1970s version. Equipped with two barely mobile cars and a seized-up MG motor, around which Richard wants to build an entire sports car, they plan to rent a suave apartment, get cool jobs, meet girls, and lose their virginity. Dream and reality diverge immediately. 307 1/2 Hibiscus Street is an old triplex subdivided for summer tenants into a self-contained ghetto. The only window in Apartment X is in the kitchenette, and the entrance is through the outdoor shower used by the entire building. The friends find work: Brian cleans the parking lot and grill of a grease-encrusted burger joint, and Richard preens himself on his lofty -- though brief -- position as a lifeguard. Fred replaces the drunken usher at the Queen Theatre, where monsters slavering over shrieking blondes and Annette Funicello's bursting brassiere entertain necking teens and "pervs" too timid to patronize real porn flicks. Fred's feelings for his chameleon girlfriend lurch from love to lust to horror, depending on whether she's demurely selling movie tickets, acting out erotic fantasies about saving the world on the back seat of a school bus, or sharing the shower with Brian. The Summer of Apartment X lurks in everyone's past: the first foray beyond the view of elders, the first attempt at self-support, the shocking recognition that adulthood involves more than sand, sex, and cars. Lesley Choyce recreates this exhilarating terror in the Technicolor of a B-movie poster, nostalgia undercut at every turn by ebullient humour.

Lesley Choyce writes rings around most Canadian authors. Even so, the most recent of his five books of stories came out in 1988, and most are out of print. It's time for a new collection and here it is -- "Dance the Rocks Ashore" or, as one might say, choice Choyce.

"Dance the Rocks Ashore" contains substantial new stories including "Dance the Rocks Ashore," a bittersweet account of an elderly couple's decline; the hilarious and bizarre "My Father Was a Book Reviewer"; "The Third or Fourth Happiest Man in Nova Scotia," with a peculiar hero reminiscent of Noah; and "The Wreck of the Sister Theresa," in which spring fever hits like "a handshake in hell." Favourite stories from previous books include "Losing Ground," the pivotal chapter in Choyce's acclaimed 1989 novel "The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson," as well as "The Cure," "Dancing the Night Away," and the complex and disturbing "Conventional Emotions."

A dazzling story told in verse of sixteen-year-old Declan Lynch and the girl whose centuries-old voice rings in his head. One day, Declan Lynch, a restless teenager, starts hearing a girl’s voice inside his head. Eventually, he even begins to see her. Though he’s not certain the girl, Rebecca, is real, Declan finds himself falling for her. She shows him visions of places and people he has never seen — places he feels compelled to find in hopes of meeting her. His quest takes him to County Sligo, Ireland, and its “thin places,” spots where the earth and the spirit world seem almost to touch. His slightly crazy Uncle Seamus takes him in, as Declan’s search has him wondering which world he belongs to — his or the one belonging to a girl who might not even be real.

When their farm gets expropriated to make way for the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant, Alexander McNab and his family move to Saint John. Without the magic of the Bay of Fundy, without the bright companionship of his little sister, Alex grows up a lonely, insecure failure. At 30, he's had enough; to make a clean break, he moves to Halifax. There, he is hired as a counsellor at New Dawn, a rehabilitation workshop, even though he has no professional qualifications. Alex soon becomes part of the New Dawn family, and the distinction between the helper and the helped blurs. The key may be that Alex takes for granted the wholeness in each of these damaged adults. Blind Jeff, 17, knows everything about cars, so Alex takes him out to the parking lot and teaches him to drive. In turn, Alex is adopted by Cornwallis Itwaru, a descendent of Jamaican Maroons plagued by encroaching Alzheimer's, who firmly adjusts Alex's fuzzy thinking. Alex sees right away that Gloria Vincent, who suffers from schizophrenia, has adopted a sloppy dress and ugly glasses as camouflage for her intelligence and beauty, and his discovery does not wholly displease her. Unfortunately, New Dawn goes broke, but by the time the landlord padlocks the doors, Alex has learned that living life fully doesn't depend on external circumstances.

A book about a love affair with Nova Scotia, about the search for a sane and magnificent asylum away from the indutrial world.