By day she was a respectable schoolteacher named Alice Freeman. By night she was The Empire's crusading journalist, Faith Fenton, who dared to challenge the conventions and values of the Victorian era. Jill Downie has uncovered the secret of Alice/Faith, the unconventional daughter of a shopkeeper who took on another identity to penetrate the closed, very male world of journalism. As columnist Faith moved with ease through society, equally at home with the rich and powerful and the less fortunate - from Lady Aberdeen, wife of the Governor- General, to the working mothers of Toronto's slums. She was everywhere, attending costume balls, visiting an aging Sir John A. Macdonald, interviewing the fiery suffragette Susan B. Anthony, covering sensational murder trials. At the height of the Klondike gold rush she reinvented herself once again heading for Dawson City as the special correspondent of The Globe. And there she met and married the love of her life. 
A Passionate Pen is a stylish, richly documented portrait of turn-of-the-century Canada. Meticulously researched and filled with the spirit of the times, it brings alive a witty and intelligent woman whose passionate concerns are as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago.

A Passionate Pen: The Life and Times of Faith Fenton

Biographies & Memoirs

Downie, Jill

Community & Culture

Harpercollins Canada

By day she was a respectable schoolteacher named Alice Freeman. By night she was The Empire's crusading journalist, Faith Fenton, who dared to challenge the conventions and values of the Victorian era. Jill Downie has uncovered the secret of Alice/Faith, the unconventional daughter of a shopkeeper who took on another identity to penetrate the closed, very male world of journalism. As columnist Faith moved with ease through society, equally at home with the rich and powerful and the less fortunate - from Lady Aberdeen, wife of the Governor- General, to the working mothers of Toronto's slums. She was everywhere, attending costume balls, visiting an aging Sir John A. Macdonald, interviewing the fiery suffragette Susan B. Anthony, covering sensational murder trials. At the height of the Klondike gold rush she reinvented herself once again heading for Dawson City as the special correspondent of The Globe. And there she met and married the love of her life. A Passionate Pen is a stylish, richly documented portrait of turn-of-the-century Canada. Meticulously researched and filled with the spirit of the times, it brings alive a witty and intelligent woman whose passionate concerns are as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago.

Turn of the Century

Romance

Historical

AVON.

Alphabet Puzzle

Children's Books

Education & Reference

Andersen Press

There’s nowhere to hide from international intrigue and murder most foul even on an island as small as Guernsey. Second in the Moretti and Falla Mystery series. 
In St. Peter Port Harbour on the Channel Island of Guernsey, Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his partner, Detective Sergeant Liz Falla, are called in to investigate the shooting death of arms dealer Bernard Masterson on the Just Desserts, his luxury yacht. Why are Masterson, his glamorous partner in crime, Adèle Letourneau, and his thuggish bodyguard here on the island? And how are an ex-Folies Bergère dancer, a former espionage agent, and a wealthy sax-playing financier involved – or are they? With the knowledge that there’s nowhere to hide in a world now as small as his island, and not knowing whom to trust in a mystery involving money and international intrigue, Moretti goes to London in search of answers, returning to Guernsey for a violent showdown on the Just Desserts. Watch for Blood WIll Out arriving September 2014.

A Grave Waiting: A Moretti and Falla Mystery (A Moretti and Falla Mystery, 2)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Dundurn Press

Storming the Castle tells the colorful upstairs/downstairs saga of two remarkable, unsung women of the Edwardian era, whose lives would intersect in Canada at that era's precipitate end. While the ninth Duchess of Devonshire and her cook were born to as different destinies as can be imagined, those destinies were forged in a singular historical moment. These were the last golden days of Empire, remembered as much for their splendor and pageantry as for their utter obliteration in the First World War. In this, la belle epoque, Ritz and Escoffier would reinvent magnificently the trappings of leisure, while women would attempt to reinvent the sexual hierarchy. This was the social and political backdrop in which Evelyn Lansdowne and Dorothea Mary Lee would find themselves. 
Evelyn, the beautiful daughter of Lord and Lady Lansdowne, was born to privilege. But privilege, as she would learn, had its price. Her marriage to Victor Cavendish soon to become the ninth Duke of Devonshire and later, Canada's Governor-General would literally and materially entitle her. But it would also cloak her in the increasingly heavy mantle of service to Queen and country. She was a woman divided, her needs and desires often at odds with her public role. 
Dora Lee, the daughter of a wheelwright, was by age thirteen sent from home to work as a scullery maid. Yet by age twenty-four, she had risen, remarkably, to the position of cookfor some of England's most aristocratic households, none more so than that of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in whose service she would embark for Canada. 
Together, albeit from opposite sides of the parlor doors, the stories of Dora and the Duchess offer us an intimate and uniquely well-documented social portrait of the halcyon days of the ruling class, and the servant class who toiled for its pleasure. And as the narratives of Evie and Dora intertwine at Rideau Hall, the Governor-General's mansion in Ottawa, in the early years of this century, they bear close, bittersweet witness to the decimation of that splendid , rarified world in the cauldron of war.

Storming the castle: The world of Dora and the Duchess

Key Porter Books

On the English Channel Island of Guernsey, Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his new partner, Liz Falla, investigate vicious attacks on Epicure Films. The international production company is shooting a movie based on British bad-boy author Gilbert Ensor’s bestselling novel about an Italian aristocratic family at the end of the Second World War, using fortifications from the German occupation of Guernsey as locations, and the manor house belonging to the expatriate Vannonis. When vandalism escalates into murder, Moretti must resist the attractions of Ensor’s glamorous American wife, Sydney, consolidate his working relationship with Falla, and establish whether the murders on Guernsey go beyond the island. Why is the Marchesa Vannoni in Guernsey? What is the significance of the design that appears on the daggers used as murder weapons, as well as on the Vannoni family crest? And what role does the marchesas statuesque niece, Giulia, who runs the family business and is probably bisexual, really play?

Daggers and Men's Smiles: A Moretti and Falla Mystery (A Moretti and Falla Mystery, 1)

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