Steeple Green Books

03/23/2025

This dazzling book showcases dozens of Paul Gauguin's most celebrated works and presents a new consideration of the artist's relationships.

This vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin's life and work features more than fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen, including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art and Gauguin's works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin's groundbreaking use of color, line, and form. Essays examine Gauguin's relationships and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into Gauguin's travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and spirituality. Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin's extraordinary oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and work continue to fascinate to the present day.

Copublished by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and DelMonico Books

$35

03/22/2025

Getting to know the neighbours.

03/21/2025

A laugh-out-loud picture book with a feel-good message from bestselling comics creator Kate Beaton about a half-human-half-shark bent on revenge after a greedy fishing captain messes with her waters – perfect for fans of We Don’t Eat Our Classmates and The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors.

When Shark Girl is captured by an evil fishing captain's net, she makes a vow... for REVENGE!

With the sea witch's help, Shark Girl becomes a human sailor and launches a plan... for MUTINY!

But Shark Girl needs the help of her crew mates before she can enact her plan. Will Shark girl SINK... or SWIM?

Bestselling creator Kate Beaton has created a subversive and hilarious spin on the classic little mermaid fairytale that will inspire little readers. Sometimes standing up for what's right means you have to show your teeth!

03/21/2025

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something, anything, before it is all gone.”
- John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

03/20/2025

We're renewing our vows with Martinique Desserterie! ☕💚📚

Hey friends! We've decided to extend our Book & Coffee deal with

Make a purchase at Steeple Green and recieve a same day free coffee or tea OR purchase a treat from us and recieve a 25% off discount at Steeple Green!

03/20/2025

Old Fashioned East Coast Cookies, Cakes, Pies and Treats is a collection of the East Coast’s most iconic and delicious sweets. Each recipe, tested and updated for today’s home cooks, will bring readers back to the kitchens of their mothers and grandmothers – or be a delicious souvenir of time spent on the East Coast. This new pocket edition features new photographs of favourite recipes.

Regional, heritage recipes including Cape Breton Long Johns, Ingonish Oatcakes, Lunenburg Skillet Scones, Strawberry Shortcake, Annapolis Valley Apple Pudding and Snow Maple Caramels celebrate local local ingredients – and history.

$19.95

03/20/2025

The edible bounty of Canada’s fields, forests, marshes and mountainsides are illuminated by Blanche Pownall Garrett in this classic Canadian cookbook.

Offering a wonderful array of cooking possibilities, this book includes more than 160 recipes using forty common, wild and edible plants, found from coast to coast.

Organized by season, with multiple recipes for each featured plant, each section provides information about where to find each plant along with full-colour photography to aid in identification, and a detailed text description.

The selection of recipes offer a wide variety of new culinary adventures for every kind of occasion and chef — preserves, syrups, candies, soups, salads, appetizers, main dishes, dessert, and even wines.

Originally published in 1975, this new edition of this classic cookbook features full-colour photos and updated recipes.

$29.95

03/19/2025

⚠️⚠️⚠️

Okay so, 25% book tariffs are set to go live April 2. This is tricky for a number of reasons but the simplest is that most books are published & warehoused in the US, even those by Canadian authors, so this makes it infinitely more complicated than "Buy Canadian Authors" or slapping on a sticker.

For instance maybe it's a Canadian author, great! But their book is coming from the US, boo! It's now 25% more expensive for you or us!

Maybe it's an American author, boo! But their book is already here in Canada, great! It's regular price and so that is actually good for us!

Maybe it's a Canadian author, great! And the book is printed in Canada, great! But Canadian distribution for a lot of Canadian publishers is already at capacity and a huge increase in demand is going to make everything take forever, not great!

Profit margins on books are already one of the worst for any retail business, so bookstores suddenly losing 25% will be disastrous for almost everybody. If a bookstore raises the price of a book to cover the tariff, folks will be more likely to buy it on amazon, an extremely terrible US company!

Everything is nonsense nowadays so maybe this doesn't happen, but if it does the Canadian book industry could completely collapse. The Dept of Finance is seeking feedback from businesses, stakeholders and Canadians until April 2 on the impacts of applying tariffs to more goods.

So make your voice heard, write or call your MPs, and if the tariffs will affect you, fill out the Dept of Finance's survey at the link below!

https://forms-formulaires.alpha.canada.ca/en/id/cm7upmkx9008rx268zhy9l6pj

03/19/2025

It's book club day.

Our next book club meeting is just a week away. There are a few copies left if any zippy readers still want to join.

By the Sea is a masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which two immigrants’ conflicting stories about their common homeland reveal the buried truths that drove them from it.

On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from his native Zanzibar. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession—a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise, silence his only protection. Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, a distinguished young professor, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When the two encounter each other in an English seaside town, the narratives each carries of their mutual past begin to unravel—revealing an infinitely more fascinating story of love and betrayal, seduction and possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.

03/19/2025

Renowned journalist and author of The Heart is a Shifting Sea Elizabeth Flock investigates what few dare to confront, or even imagine: the role and necessity of female-led violence in response to systems built against women.

In The Furies, Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said r***d her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer.

Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria—The Furies examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like?

Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.

$15

03/16/2025

Send your recipes to Eastern Shore Pride - Nova Scotia.

03/16/2025

Heroes of the Acadian Resistance tells the unique and little-known story of the young men who led an Acadian resistance in 18th century Nova Scotia. They fought valiantly in a guerilla campaign against the British to save their homes and families from destruction and deportation.

Their battle was against a form of ethnic cleansing that saw British soldiers burn every remnant of the Acadian community -- homes, barns and churches. All Acadians who the soldiers were able to round up were forcibly deported.

The French government used missionary priests as government agents to generate resistance amongst Mi'kmaq and Acadian Catholics in an attempt to regain Nova Scotia from British domination. Their efforts were welcomed by some Acadians who had their own reasons for resisting British rule. The guerilla campaign which ensued was well underway before the deportation, and continued after the majority of Acadians had been captured and forcibly exiled.

Heroes of the Acadian Resistance tells the story of that resistance and two young Acadians who proved to be leaders in these battles -- Joseph Beausoleil Broussard and Pierre II Surette. Beausoleil, who like many fellow Acadians ended up in Louisiana, is remembered in the Cajun community as a great Acadian hero. Surette lived out his days in Yarmouth County in Nova Scotia, an area which is still home to many of Surette's descendants.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the tragic events of the Acadian expulsion from 18th century Nova Scotia.

03/16/2025

An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation—about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.

"One question took center stage in my life, it focused all my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with myself: how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything."

Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown—so he sets out for school in Amiens and, later, university in Paris. He sheds the provincial “Eddy” for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly, he dines with aristocrats, he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of “the beautiful violence of being torn away,” but a vividly rendered portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, BBC, and Hudson Booksellers
A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year.

$15

03/15/2025

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy

In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.

Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.

"Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

$10

03/15/2025

Boo, director of marketing.

03/14/2025

Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author’s favourite flora.

The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.

Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems “Bearded Irises” and “Peonies.” Ian Frazier pulls weeds in “Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener,” and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in “Consider the Castor Bean”; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances.

Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has assembled this diverse crew and provides a spirited introduction. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends.

$10