The last I heard, there were still a couple of spots available for the reading I’m doing this coming Sunday, September 13th, at 1:30 p.m. at Uniacke Estate Museum Park in Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia. Please call 902-866-0032 if you’d like to book a spot.

Admission is by a donation to the Museum or a donation of a non-perishable food item for the community pantry.

I’ll read from my novel The Austens, and copies of the book will be available for purchase, courtesy of Bookmark. It was almost exactly a year ago that I did my very first event for The Austens, at Prescott House, another beloved museum, and it feels appropriate to mark one full year of amazing events for this book by reading at Uniacke Estate. It’s located at 758 #1 Highway, Mount Uniacke, NS, and the event will take place in the Tea Room.

My husband and I visited Uniacke Estate in August, and I took these photos:

Lake Martha

A Bookmark for Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies

Here’s an upcoming event that I wish I could attend: on September 22nd, Project Bookmark Canada will be unveiling a Bookmark plaque that honours Fifth Business, a novel by Robertson Davies. The unveiling ceremony takes place at 1:30 p.m. on Sept. 22nd at the Thamesville Branch of the Chatham-Kent Public Library in Thamesville, Ontario, and all are welcome.

Regular readers of my newsletter will no doubt recall that I’ve been volunteering with Project Bookmark Canada for many years and helped establish a Bookmark for Budge Wilson’s short story “The Leaving,” unveiled in Halifax, NS last fall. (Photos here.)

After more than ten years as the organizer of the Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark Canada, I stepped down from that role, but I’ll continue as a member of the group. Many thanks to Marianne Ward and Oriana Duinker for taking on the role of co-organizers! Here’s our Reading Circle last winter, raising a glass to Budge Wilson and her Bookmark:

Several members of the Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark Canada (from left to right: Jacqui Dumas, Alexander MacLeod, Oriana Duinker, Naomi MacKinnon, Sue Slade, Sarah Emsley, Marianne Ward)

And here’s the L.M. Montgomery Bookmark in Cavendish, PEI, which I visited in June, on the last day of the L.M. Montgomery Institute Conference:

Birthdays

Today is my birthday! I love that it falls on International Literacy Day. One of the things I plan to do today to celebrate is to make a donation to a literacy charity. (I also love that my half-birthday falls on International Women’s Day, March 8th.)

Speaking of birthdays, happy 10th birthday to Transactions with Beauty, Shawna Lemay’s beautiful and inspiring blog. In this recent post, she includes a link to her essay “The Sponge-Cake Model of Friendship” (inspired by a letter Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, in which she writes, “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me”). Shawna says, “Well, let’s face it this blog has always been about the sponge-cakes.”

Autumn plans and summer photos

I’m excited to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of L.M. Montgomery’s novel The Blue Castle next month, with a series of contributions from several writers.

I’ll be back later this month with a late September scrapbook page. And I recognize that this newsletter is an early September scrapbook page; over the summer I collected many things I want to share with you, including photos from the interior of St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, NS:

For today, I’ll sign off with photos from a delightful new bookstore in Mahone Bay, NS, Cat Tale Eclectics, which I visited for the first time a couple of weeks ago. So many good books, many of them by friends of mine!

I see Susan LeBlanc’s fabulous novel The Nowhere Places in the window on the left.

It was wonderful to see Christy Ann Conlin’s amazing novel Heave, published in 2002, featured at Cat Tale Eclectics.

I adored A Forest for Calum, by Frank MacDonald—it’s on my list of all-time favourites—and I love this beautiful new cover and the foreword by Tom Ryan.

Glad to see The Austens in good company with books by friends of mine, including Carol Bruneau. I’ve just finished reading her newest novel, The Little Way, which I loved. This display is from the “colour wall” at Cat Tale Eclectics.

Anna Ruadh, the Gaelic translation of Anne of Green Gables, published by Bradan Press.

Lovely to see Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon and other LMM novels prominently displayed at Cat Tale Eclectics! Can’t wait to visit again.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

Subscribe

Here are the links to the last two instalments, in case you missed them:

Book Launch for Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist

“A Fusing Full of Joy: What a Novelist Learned from Writing Biography,” by Emily Midorikawa

CBC Radio Documentary: “Our Jane”

CBC article: “‘Our Jane’: N.S. fans celebrate her 250th birthday, and her Halifax connection”

My debut novel, The Austens, is available from Pottersfield Press! Order signed copies (personalized, if you wish) from Bookmark (for shipping within Canada) or Woozles (for shipping within Canada and the United States). Order from Jane Austen Books (they’re based in Ohio and accept international orders as well as orders within the United States). The ebook is also available; additional sources are listed here.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2026 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.