Breakwater Books Ltd: 102 books

On a snowy winter night, Gerry Adamson hides from his family in a laid-up sailboat. Pushing sixty, holed-up with a laptop, he’s trying to make a novel out of thirty-odd years of compromises and betrayals that have seen him go from youthful erratic passion to late-middle-aged dithering. He’s making one last effort to make it mean something.

Sylvia Bolfe sits in her nursing home, criticizes the food and the staff—all but her trusted confidant and registered nurse, Eleanor—and with humour and feistiness recounts her turbulent life. From an upper-class Irish family, Sylvia marries a young medical student beneath her station and leaves...

The first St. John’s taxi stand started up in the early-20th Century and greatly expanded prior to the Second World War. There are now almost four hundred taxis operating within the city limits. The Other Side of Midnight: Taxi Cab Stories is not a traditional history of taxi cabs in St. John’s....

Bishop's Road is set in contemporary St. John's and tells the story of a year in the lives of a handful of odd characters, women mostly, shaken out of their pathetic complacency by a teenage delinquent with magic in her eyes.

At age ninety-two, Ivadoile Spears is in the grip of early dementia. Alone except for a cat named Rose and an old cedar box filled with photographs, Ivadoile is stubbornly set on living out her remaining years in the now-vacant Tides Inn on Cape Breton Island. The only child of cold and withdrawn...

In the fictional village of Rocky Point, Cape Breton, just after WWII, the Briar family keeps a secret. Locked in his room, Joseph Briar, a child with visible and non-visible disabilities, is hidden from the community. And what Alfie Johns discovers through Joseph’s window will lead him to love...

In deluded your sailors, Michelle Butler Hallett brings her wry humour and imagination to two distinct and interwoven stories, embracing both the eighteenth-century New World and contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador. Past and present spark off each other to ignite whirling fires in the lives of her flawed and darkly-drawn characters.

The Confessions of Nipper Mooney, full of vivid character portraits and written with a playwright's ear for dialogue, is a compelling story that charts an original course through the beauties and horrors of childhood.

"This is the story of my mother's death, my father's lighthouse, my slutty sister and the dog I betrayed." A heart-felt, at times funny, coming-of-age story set in Nova Scotia about a quirky couple who adopt a 16-year-old girl when their son, the main character, is 14.

The fishery, the seal cull, the settlement, the culture—the history of Newfoundland and Labrador has been shaped and witnessed from the deck of sea-going vessels, and those vessels were sparred with local timbers, planked and rigged by the hands of our master shipbuilders. In this companion volume...

The Last Half of the Year explores the age-old interplay between innocence and experience in a dramatic new way. Jason Dade, a deeply sensitive and strangely ambitious young man, leaves home in July on a mock-heroic quest to find himself and become the man he is meant to be. The novel moves forward...

The Chain Locker shows us how heroism, loyalty, and friendship play out in this amazing novel based on true stories about brave Newfoundland sealers.

Strays, Ed Kavanagh’s first work of fiction since the award-winning novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney, features ten memorable stories that explore the lives of those who somehow find themselves adrift. In “The Strayaway Child” a ninety-year-old woman recalls her girlhood during the Great...

The early 1970s marked the beginning of Newfoundland’s cultural renaissance. And in 1974, amidst the music, literature, and burgeoning patriotic pride, a young, upstart Reach for the Top team from Canada’s newest province had eliminated competitors from across the country, setting the stage for...