Best Maine Books

The cows come home again!

One of our most popular nonfiction titles, The Cows Are Out! Two Decades on a Maine Dairy Farm, is back in print and better than ever. Author Trudy Chambers Price has added a new
epilogue to the reissue that brings readers up to date on what has happened in her life since original publication. Trust us, it's a lot.

Here's the synopsis of a great read: Trudy Price and her husband raised two sons and hundreds of cows on Craneland Farm in Central Maine. The work was never-ending and exhausting, but also exhilarating and rewarding. In this bittersweet memoir of two decades of dairy farming, Chambers writes of the daily trials of haying, cow breeding and milking against a backdrop of gentle and entertaining rural life. She introduces kind neighbors, eccentric neighbors, visiting city folk and loveable pets. The Cows Are Out! is a tribute to hard-working family farmers and to an important part of Maine's historical and cultural heritage.

The cover is done: Mercy: The Last New England Vampire

Always exciting to finish a book cover. Our latest is the cover for our next young adult novel,   Mercy: The Last New England Vampire by Sarah L. Thomson. The book will be released in the fall of 2011.

Mercy breaks new ground in the genre of young adult vampire stories in that it is inspired by a true story. Mercy Brown and her family lived in Exeter, R.I., in the late 1890s, when the New England vampire tradition held powerful sway. When Mercy's family members began to die, fear struck deep in the hearts of the small community. Following Mercy's death, when her brother took sick, villagers convinced Mercy's father to exhume her corpse, dig out her heart, burn it and feed it to her brother. He too died – as Mercy had – from tuberculosis.

Middle-grade readers will easily identify with the modern-day narrator, Haley Brown, a 14-year-old girl who's struggling to cope with a new stepmom and baby brother. Distracted by a beloved cousin's terminal illness, her grades start to drop. Then, the boy she has a crush on starts dating her best friend. When Haley digs deep into her family history for a school project, she uncovers a disturbing New England tradition and a ghostly past. Haley must overcome doubts and confront a vampire in order to save herself and her family. Thomson's gifts as a storyteller and writer make Mercy an exciting coming of age story about loss and family.

Coming soon: Best Maine Books contest

We are conducting a survey to find the 100 best books in State of Maine history. We would like your help to create the list. What we ask is that you name your top five books. The books can be in any genre and you do not need to rank them. Please complete and return the Nominating Ballot to: Islandport Press, P.O. Box 10, Yarmouth, Maine 04096. You can also e-mail your list to bestmainebook@islandportpress.com.

From the list of books nominated and a review by our panel, we will create a ballot of the top books. Public voting for the final rankings will begin this fall. The ballot will be available at this web site.

Here are the basic rules

1. Book must be set in Maine or Maine must play a major role or be the dominating theme of the book.

2. Author does not need to be a Maine native. 

3. If the book is written by a Maine author, but is not set in Maine, the book is not eligible. 

4. Book must have been written after 1820. 

5. Can be any genre. 

6. Islandport Press is the final judge of determining whether book is a Maine book. 

7. You do not need to rank your five books.

Note: The ballot is a PDF file. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat or another PDF reader, you can download it for free here.