Description

An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the people of Paradise Deep persist in a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish.

Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Sellers and Devine families through generations, Galore is alive with singular characters, and an uncommon insight into the complexities of human nature.

Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us. This is Michael Crummey’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

Publisher Review

Michael Crummey is a passionate storyteller. His world is intensely imagined and starkly real. Life leaps off the pages of Galore. -- Jane Mendelsohn, New York Times bestselling author 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. (starred review) * Publishers Weekly * Newfoundland author Crummey's award-winning third novel . . . affirms that our lives are always astonishing. It's been justly compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez'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. (starred review) * Library Journal * 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 two hundred years of Canadian history. * Kirkus Reviews * 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. * The 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. * The Washington Post * [An] expansive yarn...in lilting prose. * The New Yorker * a well written, deftly orchestrated, consistently entertaining novel. * TLS * 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 *