Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters' lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw. But before she does so, she shares with him the family history he never knew. Crummey's survey eventually telescopes to the early 20th century, when Judah's pale great-grandson, Abel, sequesters himself amid medical debris in an old hospital where his opera singer cousin, Esther Newman, has returned and resolved to drink herself to death. Judah's mystery-is his appearance responsible for the great fishing season that follows?-is only one among many in this wild place, where the people are afflicted by ghosts and curses as much as cold and hunger. He eventually revives, turns out to be a mute, and is dubbed Judah by the locals. Crummey was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2001 for River Thieves, and Galore, his incorporation of modes familiar from Garcia Mrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into the folklore of Newfoundland, seemed an obvious choice. But when a woman known only as Devine's Widow-when she's not called an outright witch-cuts into the belly, the body of an albino man slides out. B efore the Giller Prize longlist was announced, KevinfromCanada rounded up some of the most likely picks for me to read. After a lean early-19th-century winter, a whale beaches itself and everyone in town gathers to help with the slaughter. Crummey (River Thieves) returns readers to historic Newfoundland in his mythic and gorgeous latest, set over the course of a century in the life of a hardscrabble fishing community.
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