Friends of Meager Fortune - Softcover

David Adams Richards

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224078151 ISBN 13: 9780224078153

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Synopsis

Will Jameson has a temperament of iron, standing up to men twice his age when he takes over the Jameson lumber company after his father's death. His younger brother Owen is sensitive, literary and fanciful. But when Will dies suddenly and Owen's beloved Lula rejects him, Owen's deeper character comes to light: joining the army in the hope of getting himself killed, instead Owen returns home a decorated war hero. Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia - the wife of Will's old friend Reggie Glidden - and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town's gossip and hypocrisy. Inexorably, they are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance and a sensational trial. "The Friends of Meager Fortune" is a transfixing love story and a devastating portrait of a society - but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world, that of the lumberjacks who felled the trees by hand and dragged them down mountainsides with horses. Owen Jameson begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in pitiless ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him. Rich with all the passion, ambition and almost mythic vision that defines David Adams Richards' work, "The Friends of Meager Fortune" is a profound and important book about the hands and the heart; about true greatness and true weakness; about the relentlessness of fate and the evil that men and women do. Wise, stark, and without a false word in it, it cements David Adams Richards' claim to be the finest novelist at work in Canada today.

About this title

From the Publisher

"Richards is a painfully sharp observer, who possesses one of the most distinct and compelling voices in contemporary literature." – Toronto Star

"Richards has a wonderful ear for the cadence of the language, and his compassion for his poorest characters' misery is infectious...the best of Richards' work is dark in tone, both harshly realistic and lyrically sympathetic to the most disadvantaged members of society." – The Globe and Mail

"...stark and affecting...Richards shows how powerfully the novel can operate as a mode of moral exploration a fact sometimes forgotten in the age of postmodern irony." – Publishers Weekly

"Wit and acuity mark out this Canadian writer of unaffected, unsentimental integrity." – The Observer (U.K.)

About the Author

David Adams Richards is the author of River of the Brokenhearted, Mercy Among the Children, which won the 2000 Giller Prize and was nominated for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award, and The Bay of Love and Sorrows, which has been made into a feature film.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0224078151
• ISBN 13: 9780224078153
• Binding: Paperback