Michael Crummey is a poet and storyteller, and the author of the critically acclaimed novels River Thieves and The Wreckage and the short story collection Flesh and Blood. He has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Award, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada for Galore. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
“[An] expansive yarn…in lilting prose.” —The New Yorker
“This is the book that will win Crummey a permanent place in
American readers’ hearts. With Galore he has done something much
more besides writing a compulsively readable book. He has created
an unforgettable place of the imagination. Paradise Deep belongs on
the same literary map as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Garcia
Marquez’s Macondo.” —Boston Globe
“Like the two-faced ocean they pull their living from, Crummey’s
characters in this multi-generational unwinding are icy and
surprising. The denizens of Paradise Deep and its neighboring town,
the Gut, end up as twisted as the wind-tortured trees, making for a
quirky quilt of personalities that might remind a reader of Annie
Proulx’s The Shipping News.” —Washington Post
“A glittering, fabulist tale…reminiscent of the work of Jean Giono,
particularly Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water
for Chocolate, Galore is a tale in which humans are confronted with
the miraculous.” —Los Angeles Times
“In grand language and colorful storytelling, Michael Crummey
traces through several generations the fortunes of two families
from the outport of Paradise Deep in Newfoundland…This is a book to
savor. You won’t want to miss any of its delights: the tightly
braided narrative skeins, the pathos and humor of the characters,
the exotic flavor of a long ago time and place.” —Minneapolis Star
Tribune
“In the annals of memorable family feuds, the Devines and the
Sellerses deserve to be added to the Capulets and the Montagues and
the Hatfields and McCoys…There’s also something Faulknerian in
Crummey’s small-town myth-crafting.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Distinctive and unforgettable…It’s a compelling, haunting portrait
of hard lives in a hard place, and for American readers in
particular, Crummey’s Newfoundland may prove the definitive
version.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Mythic and gorgeous…Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and
inner intricacies that mark his characters’ lives with folkloric
embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Newfoundland author Crummey’s award-winning third
novel…affirms that our lives are always astonishing. It’s been
justly compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude. It also calls to mind Graham Swift’s Waterland and Alexis
Wright’s Carpentaria, as well as William Faulkner’s epic Compson
novels, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed those works.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Ghosts, gangsters, mermen and a Christ-like healer who emerges
from the belly of a beached whale are among the attractions in a
boisterous, one-of-a-kind folk epic about feuding intermarried
clans in Newfoundland…A lively, eccentric, mythmaking novel
inspired by 200 years of Canadian history.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A dense, sprawling tale of two families bound together by love,
secrets, fate, and a mysterious stranger… Spanning two centuries of
Canadian history and presented in Garcia Marquez-inspired magical
realism fashion, Crummey’s ambitious story of immigrant settlement,
family alliances and clashes, heroism and failure is deeply moving
and disquieting, sure to make some waves.” —Booklist
“Gratitude galore for Galore, a book so alive with enchantment I
should not be surprised if it crawled right out of my hands and
into the sea. Truly, a fantastic read.” —Kate Bernheimer, author of
The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold and editor of My Mother She Killed
Me, My Father He Ate Me
“Michael Crummey is a passionate storyteller. His world is
intensely imagined and starkly real. Life leaps off the pages of
Galore.” —Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart and
American Music
“Michael Crummey’s Galore is a fabulous, fable-filled ball of yarns
such as I’ve never encountered before. Tall, but plausible tales,
odd, eccentric but weirdly familiar characters, dialogue straight
out of the mouths of outport Newfoundlanders, historicized fiction,
fictionalized history—it has, as its title suggests, a
super-abundance of good things. This is art, but not art full of
solemn, self-importance. Galore is artfully, and seriously,
entertaining.” —Wayne Johnston, author of The Colony of Unrequited
Dreams
“It’s an incredibly difficult task to make characters such as these
work as human beings as well as elements of folklore, and Crummey
does it with as much skill and grace as Gabriel Garcia Márquez does
in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” —The Globe and Mail
“Pitch-perfect, boisterous...Galore is an endearing romp. For the
language alone — and there is so much more — I loved the book.”
—National Post
“Michael Crummey’s third novel injects an element of magic realism
to convey an otherworldly quality … a dense, intricate, and
absorbing tale, rich in the nuances of human relationships.” —Quill
& Quire
“This economically told epic is masterful, written by a man with
enough confidence to let his readers interpolate the meaning not
only of certain words, but entire character arcs.” —Toronto
Star
“Galore is an absolute pleasure. In Crummey’s capable hands, the
setting breeds magic... A complex narrative that feels effortless,
yet is woven so tightly that the magnificent artistry of its
creator cannot be ignored.” —The Walrus
“In a sweeping story of several generations, Galore reveals the
lives of the Irish and West Country English in rugged
Newfoundland…Capturing the speech and temper of a primitive world,
and communicating it perfectly, the writer delivers a masterpiece.”
—ForeWord Reviews
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