In the middle of the nineteenth century, an essential link between the capitals of the Old World and the New was a dozen young Nova Scotian wild-riders. A new syndicate called the Associated Press made a deal with Cunard Steamship Lines that the Royal Mail Ships would carry a news packet to be telegraphed to New York City. A steam launch would speed the packet across the Bay of Fundy to the nearest telegraph station, at St. John. But, despite the modern miracles of steam power and electromagnetism, the fastest way to carry the news packet from the Halifax docks to the Fundy shore would still be relays of galloping horses. The Halifax Express needed riders who were light in the saddle yet long-limbed and strong enough to handle the monster thoroughbreds of the day.Seana McCann is a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant whose father's been killed in a far-off war and whose mother sees an escape from potato-grubbing poverty by marrying a wealthy farmer. It seems clear to Seana that the old farmer's not just interested in getting a readymade family, but in having a teenage stepdaughter who belongs to him until she turns twenty-one. But her mother won't listen to her and intends to go ahead with the marriage. Seana sees no way out, nowhere to run.In another part of the province, a half-Acadian half-Mi'kmaq teenage orphan feels that one of the orphanage school priests is taking an unhealthy interest in him, hanging around the stables where the boy sleeps and tends the horses. But if he fights off the priest's advances, it will be a case of a nasty half-savage attacking a Man of God, and all the orphans are the property of the Church until they turn twenty-one. He seems to be trapped, with no way of escape.Then word goes out that a new enterprise called The Halifax Express is looking for lithe and limber young men who're good with horses and willing to gallop punishing distances. It seems like an operation that won't ask too many questions, so long as you can do the job. Maybe a teenage runaway could disappear into the Halifax Express and squirrel away enough wages to have a future. Maybe even a gawky girl too tall for her age could shear her hair off and pretend to be a boy.Like all of Alfred Silver's historical novels, Runaway Horses sticks within the historical record and incorporates documented events. This story might well have happened exactly as it's told.
Who knows more about what's been swept under the carpet than the cleaning lady? Forty-something Bonnie Marsden didn't intend to become a professional charwoman, or an amateur detective. But after she gets swindled out of her job as loans officer at The Friendly Village Credit Union in Membertou County, Nova Scotia, she has to find some way to help pay the bills. Once she starts tidying other people's houses, she starts stumbling across things that tweak her overabundant curiosity and sense of right and wrong - things like a five-year-old child lost in the woods, and a retired couple killed in a botched home invasion. Bonnie's husband, Big Ben Marsden, is skeptical about poking into the corners of other people's lives. He lost his steady job two years ago and keeps up his half of the mortgage payments by cobbling together odd jobs, some of them so odd he hasn't mentioned them to his wife. They have three children living away, and a very late surprise package still living at home. Invariably, Ben and the children get drawn into Bonnie's attempts to suss out what's going on under the surface. The surface of the community they live in, like any part of rural Canada, may look bucolic from the highway, but people with several acres between themselves and their nearest neighbours can get up to some strange behaviour without anybody noticing. It's a place where well-off hobby farmers live just around the corner from people who don't grow vegetable gardens for a hobby but because they have to, and who make it through their hardscrabble days with humour and grace. Corporal Kowalchuck, the new detachment commander of the local RCMP, is a prairie boy not privy to secrets lurking in the community Bonnie's lived in all her life. But maybe Corporal Kowalchuck has some secrets of his own.
a rollicking read about the escapades of those larger-than-life characters who dominated the early days of European thirst for dominance in the New World..." Atlantic Books Today Acadia is based on the true story of the blood feud that founded the French colony and the two very different married couples at the centre of it.
Cuthbert Grant, known as the "Chief of all the Half-breeds," dreamed of creating an Eden for his half-Indian peole on the Northern Great Plains. Marie McGillis had long admired Grant, but when she married him, she discovered he was all too-human as a husband. Yet it was Marie who held the family together as Grant pursued his paradise.... With this stirring novel about a remarkble man, his tumultuous marriage, and his ultimate betrayal, Alfred Silver completes his magnificent Red River Trilogy. "From the Paperback edition.
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