Galore

Crummey's captivating generations-long novel is set in a bleak region of Labrador. The grim but fanciful atmosphere is deepened by a collection of idiosyncratic and colorfully named denizens. John Lee's rich Scots brogue lends an even more fable-like quality to the proceedings. His reading is full of wonder and, at the same time, complete acceptance of Crummey's characters, despite their many foibles, willfulness, and self-destructive natures. In this isolated, frozen land, resentments over real and imagined slights are borne and nursed for years, predictably exploding every so often, with wide repercussions. Lee reads without judgment, evoking an appreciation of the fathomlessness of human interaction. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 3, 2011
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.