Random Passage

Forced to flee England, the Andrews family books passage to a fresh start in a distant country, only to discover a barren, inhospitable land at the end of their crossing. To seventeen-year-old Lavinia, uprooted from everything familiar, it seems a fate worse than the one they left behind. Driven by loneliness she begins a journal. Random Passage satisfies the craving for those details that headstones and history books can never give: the real story of our Newfoundland ancestors, of how time and chance brought them to the forbidding shores of a new found land. It is a saga of families and of individuals; of acquisitive Mary Bundle; of charming Ned Andrews, whose thievery has turned his family into exiles; of mad Ida; of Thomas Hutchings, who might be an aristocrat, a holy man, or a murderer; and of Lavinia - who wrote down the truth and lies about them all. Random Passage has been adapted into a CBC miniseries and is now a national bestseller.

A twentieth-century descendant of Lavinia, from Bernice Morgan's bestselling novel Random Passage, Lav rediscovers the power of her heritage and a courage she didn't know she possessed. Waiting for Time continues the saga of the inhabitants of Cape Random. It also tells the story of Newfoundland a place where the past overshadows the present and shapes the future. This is the story of lonely, unplanned journeys, of courage and pride, of loss that must be endured again and again until we understand the nature of the path we have taken and the place at which we arrived.

Marie McCarthy has been Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Maryland since 1995. She has edited two colloquia volumes and has contributed chapters to several books.