Cape Breton Road

From the prize-winning short-story writer, a rich, masterfully crafted novel, set against the beautiful but harsh Nova Scotia landscape.

Innis Corbett was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, into a Highlander community whose inhabitants are held by ties of memory and blood. But as a small child he moves to Boston with his father and mother. Tragedy strikes when his father is killed by a car and Innis is left in the sole care of his mother who has a weakness for men and sometimes for drink. When Innis gets in trouble with the law over a series of car thefts (he has a liking for fancy cars and pot), he is deported to Canada, a punishment, to him, worse than going to prison.

Innis goes to live with his bachelor uncle, Starr, in rural Cape Breton, in the rugged landscape that had shaped three generations of his family. Inspired and challenged by this environment, he takes refuge in the wild, dense woods, where he devises a plan to grow pot. His new venture helps assuage his loneliness and gives him something to care for, a secret of his own. Then Claire, an attractive woman nearing 40 enters the Corbett household. So begins an entanglement that leads to suspicion, jealousy, and ultimately to violence.

Cape Breton Road is an exceptional first novel by a writer with an unerring eye for tragedy that seems to grow from the soil.

D.R. MacDonald was born on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Raised mostly in Ontario, he put himself through college working on the Great Lakes' ore freighters, and began writing seriously in 1969 when he received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford. Eyestone, his short story collection, was published by Pushcart Press and Viking Penguin. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram Merrill Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and an O. Henry Award for a story now part of a new collection. He teaches at Stanford University, and spends his summers at his home in Cape Breton.