Sweetland, Michael Crummey
Sweetland, Michael Crummey
5 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Sweetland

Author: Michael Crummey

Narrator: John Lee

Unabridged: 9 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/12/2015


Synopsis

The epic tale of an endangered Newfoundland community and the struggles of one man determined to resist its extinction.

The scarcely populated town on Sweetland rests on the shore of a remote Canadian island. Its slow decline finally reaches a head when the mainland government offers each islander a generous resettlement package—the sole stipulation being that everyone must leave. Fierce and enigmatic Moses Sweetland, whose inspectors founded the village, is the only one to refuse. As he watches his neighbors abandon the island, he recalls the town's rugged history and it eccentric cast of characters. Evoking The Shipping News, Michael Crummey-one of Canada's finest novelists-conjures up the mythical, sublime world of Sweetland's past amid a stormbattered landscape haunted by local lore. As in his critically acclaimed novel Galore, Crummey masterfully weaves together past and present, creating in Sweetland a spectacular portrait of one man's battle to survive as his environment vanishes around him.

About Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey is a poet and storyteller, as well as 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 he won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada for Galore. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Canadian Jen on March 18, 2016

I'm done and it couldn’t have been fast enough. Took 100 pages to finally grasp at something that had potential but snowballed into something that went on for far too long. Moses Sweetland, 70, sits in his house on an island not far from St. John's, Nfld. The government is pressuring folks to sell an......more

Goodreads review by Jessaka on May 06, 2022

I have learned that if I don't like the first two pages of a book I will never like it. I thought it would be the same with this book because it was so boring, nothing was happening, not even up to maybe the first 100 pages. So, why didn't I quit like I would otherwise? Well, I love the ocean and wa......more

Goodreads review by Lark on April 06, 2024

I needed to train myself how to read this book. When I first read it I gave it 3 stars--I thought it was a story of a curmudgeonly old Rooster Cogburn type character and then the story runs off the rails with all these weird happenings that didn't really fit into the novel I thought I was reading. T......more