Words leave imprints in your mind like footprints in the sand...
1990s -Place names tell the story of this island – Gripe Point, Breakheart Point, Savage Point but also Bay of Hope. There was no road across the island until the 1960s. To go there via these pages is to get a real sense of Newfoundland and its people.
Quoyle is a hapless journalist living and working in New York. He has rather a disastrous marriage to Petal and they have two small children. He is what you might call a lovable oaf, who gets by, one day to the next. But one day tragedy strikes and his wife is killed in a road accident. This event makes him want to change his life completely and so he returns to the land of his forefathers with his children and aunt, to the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland.
Newfoundland is a place of rest and relaxation compared to the bustling big apple, but it is also a place where he will have time to recover and find a new life for him and his children. He gets a job on the local paper delivering stories and the shipping news.
And his life here will turn out to be as unexpected as anything as choppy and changing as the news he reports.
Newfoundland is a large island on the eastern coast of Canada, known for its variable maritime weather.
The weather and environment is harsh and provides the perfect backdrop for a novel about maritime discord and raw emotions as well as the pounding waves and breaking storms. This is the perfect backdrop for the story of one man finding his way in a harsh and rural landscape.
Newfoundland is a unique place in Canada – (pronounced New-fun-land as was discovered on one embarrassing occasion) as they have their own culture, cuisine and dialect.
For generations, cod fishery defined Newfoundland as it gave those on the island both a cultural and social identity. This is Quoyle’s home now, where he has to find a way forward in the world. The tough climate in every sense of the word, is going to be either his undoing or his salvation. The people here are both punished and supported by the sea.
When Quoyle starts to renovate the old family home, his daughter starts to have nightmares and Quoyle, the family takes the reader on an emotional and turbulent journey into a man’s desire to be a father and the search for new beginnings in a new found land.
