Down East Books: 419 books

Island Wars originally appeared on DownEast.com and ran for roughly three months, emulating in the real time the passage of time in the book. It chronicles the daily exploits of Donovan Graham, a recent college graduate whose first assignment as a newspaper reporter is to cover the escalating border...

Set in an enchanting, mysterious, and sometimes very hard state, the selections in Best Maine Stories speak profoundly to the rest of America of a unique land of the heart.

A Cub Explores tells the story of a day in the life of a black bear cub and his mother, including the discovery of a painted turtle, an encounter with a huge bull moose, a frightening confrontation with a bobcat, and a sighting of beavers at work. Illustrated throughout with realistic and beautifully rendered colored pencil drawings.

This charming and highly original story reveals what happens at a vacation cottage once the summer visitors have left for the winter. With fewer than two dozen words, the story is told primarily in pictures. Children and adults will revel in the activities of a family of bears that takes up residence...

Photographer Frank Chillemi experienced the coast of Maine with its evocative light and beauty for the first time in 1988, and in his heart he has never left. Working, studying, and teaching along these shores ever since, Frank has produced a body of work, represented in this book, that reflects his...

Photographer Greg Currier presents a very different side of America's favorite crustacean, one flooded with the brilliant colors of the buoys, boats, traps, and foul-weather gear of the working lobsterman. Currier captures beauty in the everyday experience of lobstering, as well as in the peaceful pre-dawn start of a lobsterman's day along the coast of Maine.

Once again, Van Reid enthralls with a story filled with wonderment, romance, and old-fashioned adventure, from the catacomb-like underground of the Portland waterfront to a perilous night pursuit on the October coast. During the autumn of 1896 in Portland, Maine, feisty society columnist Mollie Peer...

Van Reid's Moosepath League novels will sweep you away to a joyful time and place, sparkling with lighthearted comedy, splendid writing, and a playful, romantic spirit. Mrs. Roberto, the fourth installment of Van Reid's utterly charming Moosepath League series, begins as portly, jovial Tobias...

Opening with the long-awaited wedding of Mister Walton, Fiddler's Green follows Mister Walton's aide-de-camp, Sundry Moss, as he embarks on a Good Samaritan mission. What seems like a harmless journey soon turns into a nearly fatal scrape as he finds himself in a strange rustic netherworld, caught...

Deep in the woods of Maine, the Revolutionary War is still fresh in settlers' minds as a young man named Peter Loon sets off at his mother's urging to find a mysterious person. Peter, who has never been away from his home, quickly falls into a series of startling entanglements. He befriends a nomadic...

The cultural phenomenon of “fairy houses” crafted solely from available natural materials apparently originated spontaneously on a few Maine islands, and in recent years, these charming, wee shelters made from leaves, moss, twigs, stones, bark, shells, feathers, and other found items have caught...

What is it about lighthouses that make them bastions of spiritual activity? Built for strength and permanence, they are nonetheless vulnerable, protecting lives yet isolated and remote. Unforgiving of human frailty, these outposts inevitably become the settings for tragedy—and for the spirits that...

A tranquil pond becomes a frightening place for a loon chick that is separated from his parents by a menacing snapping turtle. But the brave little bird remains in his hiding place and also survives encounters with a huge moose, a hungry raccoon, and a speedy otter. In the end, he is reunited with...

Drawing upon original sources and published material, A Distant War Comes Home is a fascinating survey of the many individual stories that linked Maine with the war hundreds of miles away.