Very heavy book will incur extra postal charges if ordered from overseas. Very little wear to the dust jacket but it is very faded to the rear. Book has very little shelf and reading wear.

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Gaff Topsails
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Publication Date: 1998
Language: English
ISBN 10: 0241137845
ISBN 13: 9780241137840
Binding: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Edition
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

GAFF TOPSAILS tells of an Irish Catholic community on Canada's Atlantic coast. Set on Midsummer's Day it portrays the whole history of the town. Vigour and lyricism alternate to present an action-packed, intimate and frequently funny story variouslyreminiscent of LAKE WOEBEGONE DAYS, THE SHIPPING NEWS and GROUNDHOG DAY.

Review

In this ambitious first novel, author Patrick Kavanagh chronicles a single day--June 24, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist--in a remote village in remote Newfoundland. June 24 is also Sweethearts Day, a day on which young women perform rituals as old as the hills to determine whom they will marry. These two celebrations, one Catholic, the other pagan, serve as the twin lodestones around which Gaff Topsails weaves its complex tale. On the one hand, there is Father MacMurrough, a restless priest who sees his new parish as a punishment and Kevin, an altar boy troubled by notions of God and sin; on the other there is Mary, a young woman in love with love and Michael Barron, a young mute who is starved for it. These characters live out their single day between the twin shadows of two mountains (Gaff Topsails) and an iceberg offshore, their physical isolation a symbol of the spiritual solitude in which they all exist.

Comparisons to James Joyce's Ulysses are, perhaps, inevitable, with the archetypes Kavanagh presents (the fisherman's wife waiting, like Penelope, for her husband to return from the sea), the fragmented narrative, and the occasional stream of consciousness. Like Ulysses, Gaff Topsails is not an easy book to read, but in the end, this novel rewards the patient reader with a crystalline portrait of a day in the life of a small community

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

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