Galore
A Novel
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Caribbean & Canada and the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award; Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Book Award, and the Winterset Award
When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish, but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon.
Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore, but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries.
With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crummey (River Thieves) returns readers to historic Newfoundland in his mythic and gorgeous latest, set over the course of a century in the life of a hardscrabble fishing community. After a lean early-19th-century winter, a whale beaches itself and everyone in town gathers to help with the slaughter. But when a woman known only as Devine's Widow when she's not called an outright witch cuts into the belly, the body of an albino man slides out. He eventually revives, turns out to be a mute, and is dubbed Judah by the locals. Judah's mystery is his appearance responsible for the great fishing season that follows? is only one among many in this wild place, where the people are afflicted by ghosts and curses as much as cold and hunger. Crummey's survey eventually telescopes to the early 20th century, when Judah's pale great-grandson, Abel, sequesters himself amid medical debris in an old hospital where his opera singer cousin, Esther Newman, has returned and resolved to drink herself to death. But before she does so, she shares with him the family history he never knew. Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters' lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw.
Customer Reviews
Memories
I bought this book after hearing a PBS interview with the author and was intrigued.
I loved it from start to finished and was transported to that wild and desolate place that possessed a quality many of us have lost in society - community.
As a young man I was fortunate to live for a year in coastal Labrador, and visited Newfoundland to tour it's bleak shores, wondering then how anyone could live there, let alone eke an existence amongst it. I remembered with fondness of the people with their odd Irish-like accents and felt at home with them.
The book brought all those memories back and I was transported to that place, albeit centuries earlier.
Crumney is an excellent writer with the true gift to enter the minds of others and to take you there with him.
Read it, you won't regret it!
Galore-ious.
Fantastic book.