For the first time, bestselling novelist, columnist, and humorist Lesley Crewe's finest newspaper columns are collected in one place. Not merely razor sharp, Lesley's wit is also ocean wide, taking in everything from the humiliations of breast pumping to the indignities of aging, from the frantic excess of holiday preparations to the homey irritations of a long marriage. As precise in her observations as Jane Austen and as fractious on occasion as...

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 well-off aunt, the only other normal person in the family, wants to help her more, but Mary's mother is too prickly and proud. So Mary goes to work, comes home, takes care of her family, and wonders if...

The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie's banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery....

TRADITIONS, CREATED AND SUBVERTED. Love, nurtured and destroyed. Friendships, marriages, and the wild beauty of Cape Breton Island. And above all, kin, in all its convoluted forms. In Kin, bestselling author Lesley Crewe traces the tangled lines of loyalty, tragedy, joy, and love through three generations of families. Beginning with Annie Macdonald, an effervescent seven-year-old living in Glace Bay in the 1930s, and ending with Annie's great-niece...

Bestselling author of The Spoon Stealer brings more of her sharp Cape Breton wit to the follow-up non-fiction collection to Leacock—longlisted Are You Kidding Me?! I Kid You Not! is a follow-up to bestselling author Lesley Crewe's first hit column-and-essay collection, Are You Kidding Me?! Here Lesley is hilarious and insightful as ever, giving us her take on everything from hockey to wildlife to the ache of missing our ancestors in ninety essays....

Born into a basket of clean sheets-ruining a perfectly good load of laundry-Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best...

Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they're all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda's philandering husband's Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who's actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver...