Michael Crummey

Sweetland is a story about one man's struggles against the forces of nature on a remote island just off Newfoundland.

a novel

Sweetland

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Innocents, a dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations, the corruption of power and the power of corruption. In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences. Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud. Compulsively readable and uncompromising, The Adversary is a pitch-perfect evocation of a lost time, and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution. It is Michael Crummey's finest novel to date.

A Novel

The Adversary

"In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences. Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud."--

The Innocents

Lisa Moore

Carmelita McGrath

Mary Dalton

Mark Callanan

Robin McGrath

Agnes Walsh

Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador

Riddle Fence

roman

Arguments with Gravity

Surviving Poetry in the 21st Century

Burn Barrel

Stan Dragland

"A retrospective look at the career of NL artist Gerald Squires, fully illustrated, with essays by the renowned critic Stan Dragland and creative writer Michael Crummey."--

Gerald Squires

Short stories, thirteen linked stories, mining town of Black Rock Newfoundland. Canadian author.

Flesh and Blood

"Michael Crummey gathers together selections from his first four books of poetry with a significant offering of new work. In this collection, Crummey emerges not only as the master storyteller we know him to be, but also as one of your great poets of connection."--Back cover.

New and Selected

Little Dogs

Poems by Michael Crummey; Wood Engravings by Alan Stein [prospectus].

Viewfinder

At the turn of the nineteenth century, naval officer David Buchan arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk or "Red Indians," the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area's most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father—a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk—and his troubled conscience. When Buchan's peace expedition into "Indian country" goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins to divide those closest to them. Years later, a second expedition leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband and Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened on the Red Indians' lake, a delicate web of obligation and debt slowly unravels. An enthralling story of great passion and suspense, vividly set in the stark Newfoundland landscape and driven by an extraordinary cast of characters, River Thieves captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of those caught in its wake.

River Thieves

Award-winning writer Michael Crummey's new novel is a haunting, intricately seductive tale of love and war, and the lives of two young people indelibly marked by both. The Wreckage is a compelling story of love crossed by the blindness of faith and fate, played out in the outports of Newfoundland, the POW camps of Japan, and the cities and small towns of mid-century America. At the onset of the Second World War, Wish Furey travels the coast of Newfoundland with a projector, screening Hollywood films in church and fishermen's halls. In a remote Protestant outport the young Catholic meets Sadie Parsons, a recklessly independent sixteen-year-old. The two fall into a brief but intense relationship before the disapproval of locals and the ruthless prejudice of Sadie's mother set in motion a series of events and miscommunications that drive Wish out of the Cove. Turning her back on her family and community, Sadie follows Wish to St. John's only to discover that he has enlisted in the British army and shipped out for the Pacific. She settles into the wartime city to wait for him, while Wish endures the brutality and deprivation of a Japanese POW camp on the outskirts of Nagasaki. Pursued by an American officer stationed in St. John's, Sadie remains faithful to Wish until word reaches her at the end of the war that he is dead. Broken by the news, she abandons Newfoundland to live in the United States. Fifty years later, Sadie returns home with her daughter to scatter her husband's ashes and to face the past -- a past that will come to meet her in a way she never imagined. Psychologically astute and closely observed, The Wreckage is a remarkable evocation of the circumscribed andelemental life of the tiny outports of pre-war Newfoundland, the relatively cosmopolitan glamour of wartime St. John's, and the excruciating physical and mental torments of a prisoner-of-war camp. Impeccably crafted, The Wreckage is both compulsively readable and a penetrating study of the reach and limits of love, the depths of human hatred, and the ultimate impossibility of fully knowing another or oneself.

The Wreckage

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Galore comes another unforgettable novel. By turns darkly comic and heartbreakingly sad, Sweetland is a deeply suspenseful story about one man's struggles against the forces of nature and the ruins of memory. For twelve generations, when the fish were plentiful and when they all-but disappeared, the inhabitants of this remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement, and each has been offered a generous compensation package to leave. But the money is offered with a proviso: everyone has to go; the government won't be responsible for one crazy coot who chooses to stay alone on an island. That coot is Moses Sweetland. Motivated in part by a sense of history and belonging, haunted by memories of the short and lonely time he spent away from his home as a younger man, and concerned that his somewhat eccentric great-nephew will wilt on the mainland, Moses refuses to leave. But in the face of determined, sometimes violent, opposition from his family and his friends, Sweetland is eventually swayed to sign on to the government's plan. Then a tragic accident prompts him to fake his own death and stay on the deserted island. As he manages a desperately diminishing food supply, and battles against the ravages of weather, Sweetland finds himself in the company of the vibrant ghosts of the former islanders, whose porch lights still seem to turn on at night.

Michael Crummey

About

Books

Join the club