Galore - Hardcover

Crummey, Michael

3.75

5,517 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385663145 ISBN 13: 9780385663144

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2009

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Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us. This is Michael Crummey’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the people of Paradise Deep persist in a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish.

Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Sellers and Devine families through generations, Galore is alive with singular characters, and an uncommon insight into the complexities of human nature.

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Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2011: Out of the belly of a whale, Michael Crummey pulls the marvelous story of Paradise Deep, a remote settlement on the northern Newfoundland coast, a place "too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real," teeming with fierce rivalries, affections, and loyalties spanning five intertwined generations. His tale opens in a hungry winter, when a beached humpback arrives as an unexpected gift and the townspeople convene to claim their piece. From a slit in its gut spills a man--white, mute, and eerily alive--who assumes a central role in the lineage of the Divine family. Alternately feared as a devil and revered as a healer, Judah fathers a fish-scented son with the raven-haired Mary Tryphena. Their family comprises the heart of the town's rich mythology, with all its ghosts, mermaid trysts, strange accidents, miraculous babies, and impossible loves, rendered in language so gorgeously raw, it will transport you to a land whose sky is "alive with the northern lights, the roiling seines of green and red like some eerily silent music to accompany the suffering below." --Mari Malcolm

About the Author:

Michael Crummey is the author of a memoir, Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation, three books of poetry, and a book of short stories, Flesh and Blood. His first novel, River Thieves, was a finalist for the 2001 Giller Prize, and his second, The Wreckage, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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