The Ice Bridge
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Anna Starling flees a dissolving marriage in California to save herself and her artistic career, and rents a house in the isolated landscape of Cape Breton. There, her life intersects with that of her neighbor Red Murdock, a cabinetmaker who has recently lost Rosaire, the great love of his life, to cancer. Surrounded by the old ghosts of this landscape and the echoes of the indigenous Scottish culture that once lived in this isolated community, Anna and Murdock slowly come together just as the modern world encroaches on their town. When a local drug–smuggling ring starts to impede on their natural landscape, Anna finds herself caught in the crosshairs, and both she and Murdock must shake off the past in order to contend with the dark forces swirling all around them.
Part love story, part moral fable, and part quest for home and heart, The Ice Bridge is a superbly crafted tale of love after love, a novel rich in atmosphere and infused with lyrical descriptions of land and sea. It is about timeless characters caught in a distinctly modern world. Written with an ear for the cadences of Cape Breton and a profound understanding of the many emotional shadings that exist between the sexes, The Ice Bridge is another superb work from D.R. MacDonald.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This evocative literary romance from Canadian-born Stanford professor MacDonald (Lauchlin of the Bad Heart) takes place on isolated, rugged Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, during the 1990s. Forty-seven-year-old artist Anna Starling flees her small Northern California college town and philandering husband Chet and rents a rickety old house to concentrate on her art. Her closest neighbor is the Scotsman "Red Murdock" MacLennan, a talented cabinetmaker who's been drowning in drink his grief over his girlfriend's death from brain cancer. He saves Anna one night after she plunges through the thin ice on her pond and they go on to forge a friendship, while Anna also gets to know local dressmaker Breagh Carmichael and learns to cope with the "grinding cold" of a Canadian winter. So when she finds, during a beachcombing excursion, a shipment of marijuana lost by local drug dealers, it's Murdock she turns to for advice. Anna is a believable but not always sympathetic protagonist, leaving the supporting character of Murdock to make the most memorable impression in MacDonald's satisfying, bittersweet tale of love and loss.
