Coast Lines Book Club

Coast Lines Book Club encourages Memorial University alumni, faculty, staff, students and friends to connect through a common love of reading and of literature from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Coast Lines’ highlights both the importance of lifelong learning for the Memorial University community, and the role of our hugely successful creative writing program based in the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The program has played and continues to play a key role in the development and in the careers of Newfoundland and Labrador writers, most of whom have either graduated from the program or taken individual classes.

Coast Lines and Coffee - March 2024

Join us for Coast Lines and Coffee, featuring Allison Graves (Soft Serve, MA’17) and Donna Morrissey (Rage the Night, BSW’92) in conversation with Angela Antle (BA’91). We look forward to welcoming you to our latest event in our series celebrating the Newfoundland and Labrador literary landscape. The Memorial University Bookstore will be onsite with various Coast Lines titles for sale and our guests of honour will be happy to sign copies of their books following the panel discussion.

Register today!


March/April Selection

Rage the Night
By Donna Morrissey


Donna Morrissey (BSW’92) is the author of the nationally bestselling memoir Pluck, which was a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards' Non-Fiction Award, and of six acclaimed and bestselling novels. Her latest novel, Rage the Night, is a riveting account of the 1914 Newfoundland sealing disaster. Among her honours are the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Fiction for The Fortunate Brother; Sylvanus Now was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; and The Deception of Livvy Higgs was a One Read pick for Nova Scotia in 2017. Her fiction has also won awards in the US and the UK, and has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Newfoundland and a graduate of Memorial University, she lives in Halifax.


January/February Selection

Soft Serve
By Allison Graves

Allison Graves’ (MA'17) edgy debut collection of short fiction scrutinizes unconventional and confused attachments between people and the reasons they last. The extraordinary becomes the ordinary as people navigate the weird, the quirky, and the sad aspects of everyday life.

Allison Graves received her BA in English literature from Dalhousie University and her MA in creative writing from Memorial University, where she wrote this collection of short stories. Her fiction has won Room magazine’s annual fiction contest and the Newfoundland Arts and Letters Award. She is the current fiction editor of Riddle Fence. She is doing a PhD at Memorial and likes to play drums and climb Signal Hill.

Purchase your copy from Memorial University bookstore and receive a Coast Lines discount.


November/December Selection

The Raw Light of Morning
By Shelly Kawaja

Shelly Kawaja’s (BA’02, MA’04) The Raw Light of Morning is a powerful debut novel about women and children finding humour and love in the aftermath of domestic violence. Recipient of the 2022 BMO Winterset Prize.

Purchase your copy from Memorial University bookstore and receive a Coast Lines discount.

Message in a Bottle Book Cover

September/October Selection

Message in a Bottle
By Holly Hogan

Writer and wildlife biologist Holly Hogan (B.Sc.’87, M.Sc.’97)  takes us from the heart of the Labrador current to the furthest reaches of our global oceans, introducing us to an exquisite diversity of marine life while warning of a central threat to its survival: ocean plastic.

Purchase your copy from Memorial University bookstore and receive a Coast Lines discount.


July/August Selection

Hollow Bamboo
By William Ping


William Ping’s (BA ’18, MA ’20) debut novel, Hollow Bamboo recounts with humour and sympathy the often-brutal struggles, and occasional successes, faced by some of the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland.


May/June Selection

Jennie's Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood
By Wayne Johnston

Consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston (BA ’79, D. Litt. ’07) reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender and at times extremely funny memoir of his Newfoundland boyhood.