Lesley Crewe: 4 books

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 Lesley Crewe's sixth novel, we trace the tangled lines of loyalty, tragedy, joy, and love through three generations...

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...