Most Popular Books by Michael Crummey

Winner of the CBC Bookie Award for Fiction Winner of the Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award Finalist for the the BMO Winterset Award Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award An Audie Awards Finalist 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 clings to the shore of a remote Canadian island. Its slow decline has finally reached a head, with the mainland government offering each islander a generous resettlement package— the only stipulation being that everyone must leave. Fierce and enigmatic Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors founded the island, is determined to refuse. As one by one his neighbors relent, he recalls the town’s rugged history and its eccentric cast of characters. For fans of The Shipping News, Michael Crummey’s prose conjures up the mythical, sublime world of Sweetland’s past amid a storm-battered landscape haunted by local lore. In a spare style that belies “huge emotional depth and heart” (Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You), Crummey masterfully weaves together the past and present, creating in Sweetland a spectacular portrait of one man’s battle to survive as his world vanishes around him.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Caribbean & Canada and the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award; Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Book Award, and the Winterset Award When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish, but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore, but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries. With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us.

Having achieved considerable success with his first novel, River Thieves, Michael Crummey has written a book that is equally stunning and compelling. The Wreckage is a truly epic, yet twisted, romance that unfolds over decades and continents. It engages readers on the austere shores of Newfoundland’s fishing villages and drags them across to Japanese POW camps during some of the worst events of the Second World War. Haunting, lyrical, and deeply intimate, Crummey’s language fully exposes his characters’ vulnerabilities as they struggle to come to terms with their guilt and regret over decisions made during their impulsive youths. It is a testament to Crummey’s gifts as a novelist that he can flow quite easily through time, across landscapes, and between vastly different characters. He vividly captures the mental and physical anguish experienced in prison camps, and with calm lucidity explores the motives of a Japanese soldier whose actions seem inhumanly cold and calculating. Crummey toys with the readers’ sympathies, suggesting there are few distinctions between the enemy and us. He incorporates heartbreaking tragedy–the dropping of the atom bomb, lynchings in America, murderous revenge–to underscore the darker side of humanity. Crummey shows that we are capable of violence, but in the end he proves we are also capable of redemption, forgiveness, and can be led, unashamed, back to the ones we love.

"An impressive first novel" of a crisis between natives and colonists in Newfoundland, based on historical events ( Seattle Post-Intelligencer). In 1810, David Buchan, a naval officer, arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk, or "Red Indians," the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, who are facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area''s most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father—a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk—and his troubled conscience. Cassie, the fiercely self-reliant and secretive woman who keeps the family house, walks a precarious line of her own between the unspoken but obvious hopes of the younger Peyton, her loyalty to John Senior, and a steadfast refusal to compromise her independence. When Buchan''s peace expedition into "Indian country" goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins to divide those closest to them. Years later, when a second expedition to the Beothuk''s winter camp mounted by the Peytons leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband, Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened at the Red Indian''s lake, the delicate web of obligation and debt that holds together the Peyton household—and the community of settlers on the northeastern shore—slowly unravels. The tragedy of miscommunication and loss among these colonists living in a harsh environment in a crude, violent age prefigures and in some sense is seen as the cause of the more profound loss, that of an entire people. An enthralling story of great passion and suspense, vividly set in the stark Newfoundland landscape and driven by an extraordinary cast of characters, River Thieves captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of those caught in its wake.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2025 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD Shortlisted for the 2023 BMO Winterset Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Killick Capital Fiction Award, part of the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • The Globe and Mail • CBC • Toronto Star • Kirkus Reviews From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Innocents, a dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations, the corruption of power and the power of corruption. "A FLAWLESSLY CRAFTED NARRATIVE" —Wall Street Journal "CEASELESSLY ENTERTAINING" —Kirkus (starred review) "A MASTERPIECE" —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "ONE OF OUR BEST WRITERS" —Booklist (starred review) In an isolated outport on Newfoundland''s northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe''s plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar''s largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences. Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud. Compulsively readable and uncompromising, The Adversary is a pitch-perfect evocation of a lost time, and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution. It is Michael Crummey''s finest novel to date.

From the author of the best-selling, Giller-nominated River Thieves comes a heartbreaking and masterful collection of short fiction. With uncommon elegance and compassion, Michael Crummey has created a community of exiles, characters estranged from their home, from their families or, just as often, from themselves. Set largely in the small Newfoundland mining town of Black Rock, but straying as far west as Vancouver and as far east as China, these stories are subtle, stark portrayals of people alternately looking for or trying desperately to escape their place in the world. A young boy confuses love and allegiance, then stumbles into the complexities of adulthood; a brother and sister fall in love with the same woman; a frustrated wife protests her husband’s neglect by going on strike with the miners’ union; a lover’s drug habit reunites a woman with the sister she has lost. Anchor Books is proud to publish an expanded edition of Michael Crummey’s brilliant collection Flesh and Blood, which includes three original stories written just for this edition. Graceful, affecting, and generous of spirit, these stories are unforgettable.

The prizewinning author of The Innocents examines the relationships among fact, fiction, fictionalization, and appropriation in this thought-provoking work. "In all creative writing, the question of what is true and what is real are two very different considerations. Figuring out how to dance between them is a murky business." In Most of What Follows Is True, Michael Crummey examines the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the "real world" and the stories we tell to explain it. Drawing on his own experience appropriating historical characters to fictional ends, he brings forward important questions about how writers use history and real-life figures to animate fictional stories. Is there a limit to the liberties a writer can take? Is there a point at which a fictionalized history becomes a false history? What responsibilities do writers have to their readers, and to the historical and cultural materials they exploit as sources? Crummey offers thoughtful, witty views on the deep and timely conversation around appropriation.

The sixth and, on the surface, most innovative poetry collection from Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michael Crummey. Eclectic, unpredictable, and strange, Passengers follows Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer on an imagined circumnavigation of Newfoundland; traces the island escapades of Lucifer from the time of his arrival as a stowaway in the Middle Ages; and wanders the pre-pandemic cities of Europe, touching down in Stockholm’s ABBA museum, the Belfast Public Library, Austria’s plague cemeteries, and the Czech Republic’s Punkva Caves. Widely considered “one of Canada''s finest writers” (Globe and Mail), Crummey is noted for the immediacy and emotional impact of his poetry and fiction and for his ability to raise the vernacular to planes of “exquisite beauty.” Part travelogue, part archeological dig, Passengers is an eccentric guide to the wild geography, folklore, and misbegotten history of the human heart.

In Hard Light, Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father''s stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies --- electrifies --- whoever and whatever it describes. "Michael Crummey''s lucid, dexterous writing shies away from nothing, gives us the concrete particulars of daily life, the burials and butcheries, the night-time thoughts. He knows this world from the inside." -- John Steffler

Twenty years after the publication of his debut, Little Dogs: New and Selected Poems brings together selections from Michael Crummey’s first four books of poetry with a significant offering of new work. In this collection, Crummey emerges not only as the master storyteller we know him to be, but also as one of our great poets of connection. Whether reporting from a solitary room or a shared bed, recalling the barbed delirium of adolescence, the subtler negotiations of mature love, or the generational echoes between fathers and sons, these poems are deeply engaged in the business of living with others. Of living with the absence of those who have shaped and sometimes scarred us. Unafraid of confronting the darker corners of desire or of digging into the past to make sense of the present, Crummey has already given us a tremendous body of work. Little Dogs showcases the evolution of one the most distinct and celebrated Canadian writers of his generation.

Avis de tempête. Un tsunami littéraire, une bouleversante histoire d''amour ! Île Fogo, au large de Terre-Neuve, 1940. Wish Furey navigue le long des côtes pour projeter des films dans les églises et les halles aux poissons. Dans un petit port isolé, il rencontre Sadie, seize ans. Elle a le goût de l’impossible, car il est catholique et elle, protestante. Avec la même force que le raz-de-marée qui a bouleversé la vie du jeune homme onze ans plus tôt, c’est l’amour – la passion – qui jette pourtant ces deux-là dans les bras l’un de l’autre. Un affront qui aura tôt fait de déclencher l’ire de la famille de la belle, sans parler de la guerre, qui leur fera payer le prix fort... Avec une puissance et une intelligence sidérantes, Michael Crummey raconte le désir qui consume, l’euphorie et la désillusion, l’ardeur à vivre et la peur du vide. Du Canada au Japon, sur plus de cinquante ans, il excelle à ciseler l’intime sur fond de tourmente collective, et nous fait chavirer dans l’œil du cyclone de sa narration.

Dans le village de Mockbeggar, sur l''île de Terre-Neuve, la vie est rude, et cette rudesse se reflète dans le cœur des hommes. Au sein de cette petite communauté qui subsiste au rythme des saisons de pêche, un frère et une sœur se disputent le commerce de la région. D''un côté, Abe Strapp, rustre, stupide et brutal ; de l''autre, la Veuve Caines, imprévisible, froide et manipulatrice. Les deux sont prêts à tout pour l''emporter, quitte à mettre Mockbeggar à feu et à sang. Alors qu''année après année leur animosité s''accentue, nul n''échappe à la spirale de la violence. Et dans cette fresque au vitriol, où les tempêtes, les pénuries, les flibustiers et les maladies n''épargnent personne, c''est finalement le cœur humain qui se révèle être l''adversaire le plus redoutable. Un roman noir magistral, tour à tour paillard, comique ou effroyable, qui scrute les ténèbres de l''âme avec un indéniable panache. "Crummey impressionne par la dextérité avec laquelle il utilise la langue pour rendre compte de l''époque. Ce page-turner captivant est son chef-d’œuvre." Publishers Weekly