SWEETLAND

From the award-winning author of Galore comes a story about loyalty and courage, about the human will to persist even when all hope seems lost—with incomparable emotional power and depth, this is Michael Crummey's most irresistible novel yet.

For twelve generations, the inhabitants of a remote island off Newfoundland's south coast have lived and died together. Now, crippled by the loss of the commercial fishery that sustained them, they are offered a government compensation package to leave the island for good. Already abandoned by the young in search of work, facing the loss of their school, their church, their single store, the remaining residents slowly surrender to the inevitable.

All but Moses Sweetland.

Former fisherman, retired lightkeeper, lifelong bachelor, Sweetland resists the concerted, sometimes violent coercion of family and friends in order to hold onto the only place he's ever called home.
Rash, resourceful, inscrutable, cunning, Moses Sweetland ranks with fiction's most unforgettable characters, as do many of those closest to him. There is his great nephew, Jessie, a complicated youngster whose best friend happens to be Sweetland's brother, dead now for half a century. Childhood sweetheart Queenie Coffin, who hasn't stepped foot outside her house since 1970. The feral and mercenary Priddle brothers, who just might be willing to burn Sweetland out of house and home if he refuses to leave. As his options dwindle, Sweetland concocts a scheme to remain the island's only living resident. Cut off from the outside world, he is forced to call upon all his guile and strength simply to survive.

MICHAEL CRUMMEY is a poet and a storyteller, the author of the critically acclaimed novel River Thieves, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in the US, Canongate in the UK, Payot & Rivages in France and De Geus in Holland. It was also nominated for the Giller Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Award and numerous others. He won the The Writers' Trust of Canada's Timothy Findley Award in 2007.