Vagrant Press imprint: 11 books

On an October night in 1899 the body of a well-regarded city councilman is found floating under a Halifax wharf. Detective Inspector Culligan Baxter embarks on an investigation that leads from the waterfront, through the city's streets, and out into the surrounding countryside. Aided by the young...

Can you really move forward without putting the past to rest? Grace Willingdon has everything she needs. For fifteen years she’s lived in a trailer overlooking Bras d’Or Lakes in postcard-perfect Baddeck, Cape Breton, with Fletcher Parsons, a giant teddy bear who’s not even her husband....

In a Cape Breton family of black sheep, Mary is pure as the driven snow. She is patient and kind with her alcoholic grandmother and volatile mother, loyal and attentive to her spoiled cousin, and pleasant and polite all day as a grocery cashier. Her well­off aunt, the only other normal person in...

The story begins with Nell, the “spinster on the hill” near St. Peter’s, Cape Breton. Scarred by her own childhood, she swears she could never love a child and that she will never marry, denying herself a life with the man she loves. She’s proven wrong when a baby is born just down the road...

Linda Moore’s long-awaited sequel to Foul Deeds is another highly engaging mix of art and environmental justice. Finally working a real job as a researcher for the Public Prosecution Service, Roz is on her first paid vacation. She has rented a cottage on Nova Scotia’s beautiful Minas Basin with...

St. John’s archivist Michael Lowe’s life is turned on its head when a Dutch colleague, Anton Aalders, arrives on his doorstep in 1995. Anton is searching for a father he never met, ostensibly a Newfoundland soldier part of the Allied force that liberated the Netherlands at the end of World War...

It's 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony is the child of a demanding single mother and an absconding Vietnam War resister who got too used to leaving home, country, and family. With a keen eye on the hybrid Windsor-Detroit landscape, backhanded...

I must admit that when I first started losing weight I was pleased. I dropped from a pudgy hundred and twenty-five down to one-eighteen in a month, and kept on going. One hundred and five, and my breasts disappeared. By the time they hauled me off to the Sanatorium, a feverish, weepy, ninety-pound...

It’s 1943. Enman and Una Greene are newly married. Each is haunted by their respective pasts, and each harbours secrets. They have hopes of a happy life together—though they have little idea how to create such a life. Enman brings Una to his childhood home in rural Barrein, Nova Scotia, where...

Uprooted, longing for love and to feel somehow situated, Willa Jackson flees life as a military wife when she meets Hugh, the lighthouse keeper on McNabs Island in Halifax Harbour. The object of her fantasies, a musician, he’s the last of a dying breed in this story set during the final days of...

Allan Donaldson grew up in Woodstock, N.B.. As a child, he became well acquainted with the street life of the town. In his teens, he worked summers wheeling cement, tamping ties and laying steel on the railway, working on a rock crusher and an asphalt plant, and operating a jackhammer. On scholarships,...