Crummey deftly portrays the physical elements of adolescence as yet another mystifying imposition of nature, but one that both alienates the Best siblings and irrevocably binds them. Left with little more than an unreliable skiff and a set of memorized idioms to guide them (“A body must bear what can’t be helped”), the siblings battle starvation, the relentless cruelty of rain, cold and winter, and, eventually, a foreign form of isolation: the unexplained onset of puberty. Rich with visceral descriptions and outport dialogue that transports readers in both place and time, the story traces the siblings’ bone-tiring bid to stave off death as they grow up in the only place they know as home. In true Crummey fashion, the tale is set in a rural, bygone place that is simultaneously so brutal and bewitching that the island itself becomes a complex, unruly character. The Innocents is the coming-of-age story of Evered and Ada Best, young siblings who find themselves orphaned and alone in a remote, isolated cove in northern Newfoundland after their parents and infant sister succumb to fatal illnesses. Readers will get their turn to set eyes on those passages when they crack open the first pages of his fifth book, The Innocents, which hit bookstores in August. “And then I had lost my nerve.”Īt Kanya-Forstner’s encouragement, Crummey sent her the orphaned pages. “I had written a three- or four-page opening to a novel,” he recounted. She has been the lead editor on all of his novels to date and he trusts her implicitly and so issued a confession.

That “while” had stretched several years by the time Crummey found himself in his kitchen on the phone to Kanya-Forstner.

“I definitely felt that after Sweetland – I was ready not to be a writer for a while.” “Every time I finish a book I feel like I’m probably never going to write another one,” Crummey said. Thus, the three novels Crummey has produced since River Thieves – The Wreckage, Galore and Sweetland, each also highly acclaimed – have four or five years of space between them. It turns out that he has quite a deep well, but he must be judicious with withdrawals. He has previously described that place as “a world of isolated, tightly knit communities that relied on the fishery and each other for survival.” The effort of rendering it so flawlessly in his debut novel, though, wrung out Crummey and left the novelist wondering whether he had any ink left in him.

River Thieves by Michael Crummey