Aphrodisiac

Members of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdicts?” The court clerk asked her rote question with a wavering, tell-me-don’t-tell-me tone that seemed to capture perfectly the nervous, nerve-wracked mood among the more than three dozen men and women sitting in the Halifax Law Court’s Courtroom 3-1 on the blustery afternoon of December 18, 1998. Everyone in the sterile, high-ceiling, red-bricked courtroom craned to look at the six women and four men in the jury box, trying to read the tea leaves of their faces for some sign of the outcome, waiting with a kind of desperate unease for the pregnant pause between the clerk’s question and the jury forewoman’s answer to finally end. The moment only seemed to last forever. “We have,” the jury forewoman said…

STEPHEN KIMBER is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of nine books, including the novel, Reparations, and the bestselling nonfiction books, Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash and Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War. His most recent book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, was long-listed for a Libris Award as the best Canadian nonfiction book in 2013, and was named the top nonfiction book at the East Coast Literary Awards. In 2016, the Spanish edition won a Reader's Choice Award as one of the top 10 best-selling books in Cuba. For more than thirty years, he taught journalism fulltime at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. From 1996-2003, in 2007-08 and again in 2013-14, he served as Director of the School of Journalism. In 2013, he co-founded King’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. Visit his website at stephenkimber.com