About the Author

WAYNE JOHNSTON was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. His bestselling novels including The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and First Snow, Last Light. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau. He lives in Toronto. 

Reviews

"It may be the Great American Novel, except it happens to be about Newfoundland."
—Calvin Trillin, The Globe and Mail

"My big fiction treat this year."
—Ann-Marie MacDonald, National Post

"As absorbing as fiction can be—and [from] one of our continent's best writers."
—Kirkus Reviews

"The scope of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is vast, its humour is quiet and assured, its mixture of fact and fiction is altogether bracing, and its writing is about as beautiful and as imaginative as writing gets these days."
—David Macfarlane, The Globe and Mail

"A masterpiece—Mr. Johnston has a genius in him—and a haunting, unmitigated, uncanny vision and grace."
—Howard Norman, author of The Museum Guard and The Bird Artist

"This splendid, entertaining novel is both a version of David Copperfield transposed to 20th-century Newfoundland, and an evocation of vanished ways of life. . . . Rich and complex, it offers Dickensian pleasures."
—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"A spellbinding, must-read tale. . . . Johnston's authentic sense of place, history and romance are woven into a magical tapestry."
—Winnipeg Free Press

"Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer and his Newfoundland—boots and boats, rough politics and rough country, history and journalism—during the wild Smallwood years is vivid and sharp."
—E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

"A classic historical novel . . . deeply felt and powerfully imagined [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature."
—The Toronto Star

"As lived our fathers, we live not,/Where once they knelt, we stand./With neither God nor King to guard our lot, We'll guard thee, Newfoundland": so rings the resigned, ironic patriotism practiced by the inhabitants of the bitter-cold northerly territory in Johnston's (Human Amusements) grand and operatic novel, a bestseller and literary prize nominee in Canada. Treating the history of Newfoundland as a bad jokeÄwhose punch line is finally delivered on April 1, 1949, when the in-limbo British territory joins in confederation with CanadaÄJohnston's most compelling character (in a book that teems with eccentrics, drunks, swindlers and snobs), Sheilagh Fielding, writes a condensed version of the classic History of Newfoundland. The terse and mordant chapters of this masterwork, to which she devotes all her energies (when not scribbling furiously in her epistolary diary or eking out the columns of her daily political satire, "Field Day") are interleaved in the narrative to great effect. The bulk of the book comprises the autobiographical musings of historical figure Joe Smallwood, whose rise through local socialist activism to international political eminence culminates in his orchestration of the treaty with Canada. It is dwarf-sized Smallwood's tireless ambition, as well as his crippling romantic insecurity, that keep him forever at arm's length from his childhood love and best friend Fielding. In their hometown of St. John's, in Manhattan's downtown tenements, in the desolate railroad man's cabin where Fielding holes up with a typewriter and a bottle of Scotch, Smallwood and Fielding torment and intrigue one another, each harboring the shame and fury of a secret from their school days that has gone unresolved. In a book of this magnitude and inventivenessÄsome of Fielding's quips are hilarious, and Johnston proves himself cunning at manipulating and animating historical factÄit is perhaps the device of this lifelong secret that most tests the reader's faith: that full disclosure resolves all the complicated mysteries of this book is slightly disappointing. Nonetheless, the variety provided by Fielding's writings is delightful, and this brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal. BOMC and QPB selections; author tour. (July) FYI: Johnston's comic novel, The Divine Ryans (not published in the U.S.), will be released by Anchor in August to coincide with the film version, starring Pete Postlethwaite.

"It may be the Great American Novel, except it happens to be about Newfoundland."
-Calvin Trillin, The Globe and Mail

"My big fiction treat this year."
-Ann-Marie MacDonald, National Post

"As absorbing as fiction can be-and [from] one of our continent's best writers."
-Kirkus Reviews

"The scope of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is vast, its humour is quiet and assured, its mixture of fact and fiction is altogether bracing, and its writing is about as beautiful and as imaginative as writing gets these days."
-David Macfarlane, The Globe and Mail

"A masterpiece-Mr. Johnston has a genius in him-and a haunting, unmitigated, uncanny vision and grace."
-Howard Norman, author of The Museum Guard and The Bird Artist

"This splendid, entertaining novel is both a version of David Copperfield transposed to 20th-century Newfoundland, and an evocation of vanished ways of life. . . . Rich and complex, it offers Dickensian pleasures."
-Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"A spellbinding, must-read tale. . . . Johnston's authentic sense of place, history and romance are woven into a magical tapestry."
-Winnipeg Free Press

"Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer and his Newfoundland-boots and boats, rough politics and rough country, history and journalism-during the wild Smallwood years is vivid and sharp."
-E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

"A classic historical novel . . . deeply felt and powerfully imagined [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature."
-The Toronto Star