Brad Frenette is currently a journalist and digital editor at Vancouver Sun, and formerly a contributor to both The Afterword and The Ampersand at The National Post, and has also written for a pile of other places, like Montreal Gazette and The Guardian. He’s got a great taste in books (and music) so I hit him up for a suggestion.
Let’s put aside David Adams Richards permanent residency in Toronto, at least long enough for me to recommend his novel River of the Brokenhearted to those looking for a great Atlantic Canadian read this summer. After all, Richards was born and bred in Newcastle, was made an “honorary Miramichier” after his move to Ontario, and, of course, New Brunswick is the hard ground on which Richards fiction trends.
Now, I consider Richards one of the great novelists around – Atlantic Canadian, Canadian or otherwise – so it would be easy for me to recommend to the readers of this fine blog any number of his works. But River of the Brokenhearted, which was published in 2004, seems to get a bit lost between his Giller winning (2000′s Mercy Among The Children) and Giller longlisting (The Friends of Meager Fortune [2006] and The Lost Highway [2007]), and that’s why I’m recommending it. Set in a small New Brunswick town, Richards creates a family saga centred around Miles King a fantastically drawn, slowly dissolving character, his grandmother – whose task of running the town’s first cinema during the Great Depression will provide some great morsels for fans of cinematic history – and provides some class tension with the King’s nemeses: the Druken family.
In this novel, Adams deals again with dark issues, but adds humour throughout. A perfect beach read – for the banks of the Miramichi.
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