Bay of Hope
Five Years in Newfoundland
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A “come from away” exploring love, loneliness, and adventure in remote Newfoundland
Part memoir, part nature writing, part love story, Bay of Hope is an occasionally comical, often adversarial, and always emotional story about the five years ecologist David Ward lived in an isolated Newfoundland community; of how he ended up there, worked, survived the elements, and coped with loneliness and a lack of intimacy. But this book is also a story about David’s 78 McCallum, Newfoundland, neighbors, the unforgiving mountain and wilderness culture they call home, and why their government wishes they were dead.
Creative nonfiction written in the tradition of Farley Mowat’s Bay of Spirits, Ward’s memoir is also evocative of Michael Crummey’s poignant novel Sweetland and Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A book about how great adventure tales do not always have to include dramatic, never-attempted, death-defying feats, Bay of Hope shows us that a person can travel a million miles over the treacherous terrain within their hearts, as long as they’re courageous enough to make such an arduous trek.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ward (The Lost 10 Point Night) makes an unsuccessful attempt to follow in the literary nonfiction footsteps of Farley Mowat as he recounts leaving Fenelon Falls, Ont., to live alone in a Newfoundland community that's accessible only by boat. Well-traveled and worldly, Ward left his full-time college faculty job for the new adventure of living and writing in McCallum. Its population was 79 when he arrived, but it will become a ghost town if its residents decide to accept a government offer of $250,000 each to resettle in places that are less costly to maintain. It's an inherently dramatic situation that divides the close-knit village. Ward's love of the people of McCallum and Newfoundland's breathtaking landscape are clearly genuine, but his account of five years living in the community is oddly unmoving. That may be in part because the narrative is split between McCallum's story and Ward's reflections on his own life, family, and relationships, and his observations tend toward tired platitudes. Five years go by quickly, but the resulting account has no clear through-line, and Ward leaves McCallum much as he arrived. Readers will get a stronger sense of place by reading Mowat's books.
