This month's new releases include fiction, crime fiction, spec fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and YA.
If you're having trouble viewing this email, you can see it online.
Welcome to the Febuary 2023 edition of the MWPA's Ex Libris Maine.
This month's edition offers new books by Maine authors in the categories of Fiction, Crime Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young Adult / Young Readers.
For more information on any title below, simply click on the book's cover.
They’re in love. Right? Shawn has left her. Again. Their love story isn’t traditional, but Jasmine thought it was real. Now he’s walked away. Does that mean he doesn’t love her? Or does he just need time? Jasmine wants to believe their love will endure, but when a new guy in town sets his sights on her, she doesn’t know what to do. Should she wait for Shawn, or take a chance on a sure thing? If you like fake marriages, steamy love scenes, and happily-ever-afters, you won’t want to miss the fourth installment of Dani Bannister’s Where You Left Me.
Black Veil, White Rose: A Pyke Island Myster in Downeast Maine
Moe Claire
Skillings River
A boat trip to a quiet, pristine cove, nestled in a rocky peninsula just east of Pyke Island, leads to an unwelcome discovery. . .Years ago, the property around the cove was considered an ideal place for a shorefront campground. But bankruptcy had led to it being abandoned. Then squatters moved in, and the peninsula’s exclusive summer community tried everything in their power to remove them. That problem had finally been resolved when the squatters left voluntarily. Or had they left? Under the cove’s placid surface, a mystery lies on the gravel and sand bottom waiting to be snagged. Not surprisingly, Del Corriveau and friends find it and raise the ghosts, some dead, some very much alive, still keeping their secrets. This third entry in the Pyke Island Mystery Series continues the narrative readers have come to expect—unique characters, surprising twists, a slice of Downeast geology—all interlaced with humor.
In this second book in the series, crime writer Augusta Hawke attends a dinner party given by a social-climbing socialite, but the party’s over when a beloved philanthropist is murdered.
Is Leif really lucky? Stranded in orbit, viewing a destroyed civilization on Earth through the screens of a starship almost out of fuel and food, he doesn’t feel that way. Getting down to Earth is only the beginning of Leif’s problems. Those on Earth who survived the apocalyptic war are still divided, fighting over what’s left. A disastrous re-entry leaves Leif without resources or allies. He lands in the middle of a makeshift family that needs him more than he’s comfortable with and hears stories—even nursery rhymes—that speak of a lucky starman. For once, he’s the only person with tech—but if he’s caught using it, the local people might kill him. Can a man back from the stars end the warfare on Earth or will he make it worse? Can he save a family that might become his? Is he everyone’s lucky starman?
The Reading Life: The Collected Columns
Peter Bollen
iUniverse
Collected columns and Reviews. Interesting, exclusive interviews with noted authors.
Conversations with Tim and Buzz Caverly: Ranger Tales from Maine
Tim and Buzz Caverly
Illustrated by Franklin Manzo
Leicester Bay Books
Escapades, journal entries, tell-all exposés…and not a fib in the bunch! The story: Brothers Tim and Buzz Caverly have spent a lifetime working in the Maine outdoors— Buzz as ranger and director in Baxter State Park and Tim as a ranger and manager working the four corners of Maine, retiring from a career that included eighteen years as Supervisor of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. For a combined seventy-eight years, the two brothers served as Conservation Officers, administrating our state’s two largest, and often controversial premiere sanctuaries: Baxter State Park and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Along with a lifetime of living in the Maine woods came real-life adventures. Oh, the tales that could be told! Well, they are!! Ranger Tales from Baxter State Park and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
Still An Unexpected Poet
John McClenahen
Independently Published
A deliberately personal story, with illustrations, about becoming a published poet, a book that is part memoir, part prose, and mostly poetry.
This 40-page chapbook comes 50 years after Roberto Clemente's sacrifice, dying while attempting to bring humanitarian supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The poems here are not just tribute to Pittsburgh’s Hall of Fame right fielder, but to his legacy of standing up to injustice, of working toward a better world, of making something of the short time each of us has on this earth. As part of that tribute, half of every sale will be donated to the Clemente Foundation.
The Palace of Unbearable Feeling
Anne Riesenberg
Lily Poetry Review Books
Equally resonant as visual chants or textual mandalas, these 18 poems emerge from the international lineage of concrete poetry. Written during the pandemic in response to prolonged isolation and the perils of a world on tilt, The Palace Of Unbearable Feeling’s verbal-aural-visual compositions present a variety of opportunities for contemplation.
“Attuned as she is to harmony—musical, spiritual, earthly—Sholl weaves seemingly miscellaneous notes into vibrant wholes. She references Dante more than once and it’s apt, for she is very much a pilgrim, someone who conveys the feeling of being in it—the tangle that is a moment, a street scene, a biblical incident—and that is a key to her achievement, her openness to the ways of being. Great compassion marks these poems, that inestimable talent for tracing the ways of kinship, how one occasion graces another”—Baron Wormser, Award-Winning Author and Former Poet Laureate of Maine.
It’s not enough that eleven-year-old Nathan has trouble handling his feisty new horse. War rages in Europe in 1917, yet Nathan learns that enemy spies lurk in New Hampshire, where he lives in his family’s lumber camp—and they intend to burn the woods! Terrified of fire, Nathan’s suspicions and fears deepen as he tracks a frightening new teamster and discovers strange clues. Convinced the man is a spy, Nathan and his friend Orey, with help from Nathan’s horse, desperately try to thwart his plan and save the lumber camp. Will they succeed? This historical novel was inspired by photos and diaries of family members who lived in a large lumber camp during the First World War. The book includes several archival photos of the real lumber camp, which was operated by the author’s family, Paris Manufacturing Company of South Paris, Maine.
