"There are moments that are literally awe-inspiring and writing so skilled it almost brought me to tears... more ambitious than any Canadian novel in recent memory."
-The Vancouver Sun
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BLACKSTRAP HAWCO
September 27, 2008
"The Newfoundland writer has, over his lengthy career, demonstrated remarkable skill and range, from the magic realism of The Town That Forgot How to Breathe to the cold, parsed minimalism of Inside to the more experimental of his short stories."
"From the role of missionaries in the outport communities to a riveting account of the seal hunt, from rapes to infidelities, from petty crimes to everyday life, from a 13-month pregnancy and an invasion of birds to the life of a shipwrecked ancestor, the first half of Blackstrap Hawco is a polyvalent work that eschews chronological order in favour of an almost cubist sensibility."
"A hundred pages later, I began to suspect that the novel might just be the Canadian equivalent of Gabriel García Márquez's epochal One Hundred Years of Solitude. "