Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

Overview

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

The scarcely populated town of 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 ancestors 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 its 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.

Winner of Newfoundland Book Award

Short-listed for the Governor’s General Award

Winner of the CBC Bookie Award for Fiction

Finalist for the Winterset Prize

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871407900
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/19/2015
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Michael Crummey is a poet and storyteller and the author of several critically acclaimed novels. His most recent book, Galore, won the Commonwealth Prize for Canada. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Editorial Reviews

Part Independent People (for the fierce portrait of its main character's unwavering determination) and part Absalom, Absalom! (for the unusual set of characters surrounding him), Crummey's latest novel tells the absorbing story of Moses Sweetland's singular battle to hold on to his home on a tiny island off the coast of Newfoundland…In the end, though, as Crummey's elegant prose and storytelling prowess make abundantly clear, no man is an island.

The New York Times Book Review - William D. Cohan

★ 09/08/2014
Sweetland is both a place—a small island off Newfoundland—and a person—Moses Sweetland—and both have seen better times. The provincial government is offering resettlement money to Sweetland residents, but only if everyone agrees to leave. Moses Sweetland is 69 years old and has been disfigured by an industrial accident. When the story opens, he is the only person—aside from the man considered the island idiot—who opposes the government’s proposition. He’s under plenty of pressure to accept, but the island named for his ancestors, where he takes his great-nephew rabbit hunting and hands down family legends, is the only place Moses can imagine living. Crummey, whose last book, Galore, won the Commonwealth Prize, does both man and place justice: Moses is a memorably strong-willed character, whose manner of thinking and speaking are dying out. The novel also conveys the way that a sense of place is the product of relationships—among the living, with the dead, and, in Moses’s case, arising from intimate connections to land and sea. At the end of the story, Moses remains alone on the island, his supplies dwindling, beset by injury, cold, and memories—the question isn’t what will happen, but how. Having nearly trapped himself in a narrative corner, Crummey writes himself out of it, concluding the book in a way that recalls Aristotle’s maxim from the Poetics: the best endings find a way to be both surprising and inevitable. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Impetuous and imperious, Moses Sweetland is an extraordinary, beautifully realized character, and the supporting cast—including Queenie Coffin, a chain-smoking romance-novel addict who hasn’t left her house in four decades; and the feral Priddle brothers, “Irish twins” born 10 months apart—are scarcely less so. But Sweetland, Crummey’s finest novel yet, reaches its mythic and mesmerizing heights only after the others depart, leaving Moses—a Newfoundland Robinson Crusoe who even encounters a Friday-like dog—alone on his eponymous island, bracing for a bitter winter both seasonal and personal."

Macleans

"An evocative portrait of a disappearing way of life, Sweetland is also a powerful rumination on what’s lost in letting go of the past—and the sometimes-unbearable cost of trying to hold onto it. Michael Crummey’s deceptively spare language perfectly matches the tiny island community at the novel’s center: beneath the quiet surface, there’s huge emotional depth and heart."

Celeste Ng

"Part Independent People (for the fierce portrait of its main character’s unwavering determination) and part Absalom, Absalom! (for the unusual set of characters surrounding him), Crummey’s latest novel tells the absorbing story of Moses Sweetland’s singular battle to hold on to his home on a tiny island off the coast of Newfoundland. …[A]s Crummey’s elegant prose and storytelling prowess make abundantly clear, no man is an island."

William D. Cohan

"When the government orders that the population of Sweetland, an isolated and insular town on a remote Canadian island, must relocate, Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors settled the town, refuses. The novel unfolds as he remembers the island’s folklore and his family’s history, while watching his neighbors leave their homes. Beautifully capturing the wild, rugged landscape, Crummey has written a novel about love for the land one is from."

VanityFair.com - Nicole Jones

"The latest novel by the Canadian Michael Crummey tells a slow-burning, ultimately moving story about a man and a town, both called Sweetland."

New York Times - John Williams

"Wry, touching, and filled with insights into the modern human condition, Michael Crummey’s spare and sturdy prose in Sweetland delivers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of a quirky island community forced to abandon their vanishing way of life. Ignoring government bribes and threats from his neighbors, the obstinate waterman Moses Sweetland defiantly chooses the isolation of his family home off the Newfoundland coast to become a present-day Robinson Crusoe: resourceful, irascible, wily, and wholly unforgettable."

John Pipkin

"Michael Crummey's Sweetland is a beautiful prayer for a dying island and an elegy for the titular character, who is both haunted and haunting, besieged by ghosts and yet trying to stop himself from becoming one."

Alexi Zentner

08/01/2014
Winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada, Crummey sets his new work on a sparsely populated Canadian island. Now the government has offered to resettle folks from the island's one town, Sweetland, provided that everyone agrees to leave. The holdout is Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors settled the town.

Library Journal

★ 2014-11-05
On the small fictional island of Sweetland, just south of Newfoundland, a former lighthouse keeper becomes the last man standing when he refuses to accept a government resettlement package—much to everyone's exasperation.Never married and with hardly any living kin, Moses Sweetland has spent most of his 69 years on the island to which his ancestors gave their name. Since technology eliminated his lighthouse keeper job, he has done a little bit of everything, like burying bodies and pulling a baby calf from a neighbor's mistreated cow. He's a sarcastic cuss, but his attachments—especially to his niece's autistic son, who is as adamant about staying on Sweetland as Moses—are strong. In resisting the government's $100,000 cash offer, which needs to be accepted by all the occupants to go through, Moses exposes himself to a series of threats, some of them grisly. But with all the memories the island has for him, and all the secrets there still waiting to be uncovered, he plans on being there until he dies. Canadian author Crummey employs a very different style here than he did with his fanciful, widely admired 2011 novel, Galore. Like Moses, Sweetland moves in fits and starts, capturing the present in patient detail and flashing back to dwell on milestone moments in his life. Unlike most novels steeped in rural nostalgia, it gets a kick out of contemporary life: Moses plays Internet poker; his niece is hooked on Mad Men. But the elimination of an entire community, and what it represents, is deeply felt. Through its crusty protagonist, Crummey's shrewd, absorbing novel tells us how rich a life can be, even when experienced in the narrowest of physical confines.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator John Lee’s deep voice and rhythmic intonation are perfect for this beautiful novel, set amid the harsh landscape of a town with no future, a victim of the two-decade ban on cod fishing off eastern Canada. Moses Sweetland is a 70-year-old crusty inhabitant of the tiny Newfoundland settlement of Sweetland—named for his ancestors. The government has decided to move everyone to the mainland, but Sweetland refuses to go for reasons that are revealed throughout the audiobook. Lee renders Sweetland’s laconic and stubborn nature as well as his special relationship with his autistic great-nephew, Jesse. Lee’s slightly toneless performance of Jesse captures the boy’s deep well of affection but lack of emotional maturity. SWEETLAND is a spectacular meld of story and performance. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile