Writing with the same mastery and insight that have won his praise for his fiction, Richards brings to life a community centered on fly fishing--a sport that has become, for many, a way of life. Weaving together tales of the guides and poachers, the "sports" and the city slickers, Richards pays t...
Of course you don't always know where you are going – but for some reason all movements happen because they were meant to.There's a sense of inevitable tragedy at the heart of Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace and David Adams Richards is so masterful at introducing characters and then subverting...
What had happened, from those days until now? And why had it? And how had his life gone? And who was to blame? Or why did he think he had to blame anyone? Certainly he couldn’t even blame Mr. Roach, caught in the same turmoil as everyone believing half-truths in order to blame other people. (p. 1...
This book is great, for the most part. However, I think that it felt just a little bit too... cynical? David Adams Richards is clearly an incredible writer, but I got the impression that he was a little bit "ranty" at times. The ending was fantastic.Also: "In reality in Canada, there are two kind...
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down was another novel we read in my seminar class this year, and was my first DAR (David Adams Richards) novel. I KNOW. I don't know how I am Canadian, not to mention a Maritimer, and even worse a New Brunswicker and have not read anything by DAR, (though thankfull...
David Adams Richards uses the life of his grandmother as inspiration for the character Hanna Jane (Janie) McLeary King in River of the Brokenhearted, a multigenerational family saga set in a small New Brunswick village. The novel is narrated by her grandson, Wendell King, and covers four generati...
Nights Below Station Street is my introduction to the work of David Adams Richards - and it's certainly not a bad choice, as it won the author the prestigious Governor's General Award for Fiction when it was first published in 1988.Nights... is a short, quiet book set in a small mill town in the ...
I take great interest in any novel that explores violence, so David Adams Richards's Mercy Among the Children, with all its accolades and set as it is just across the bridge from the island where I live, was a must read.I had high expectations because Mercy Among the Children tied Anil's Ghost (a...
Written in taut, penetrating prose, Richards' new novel offers a wide array of unforgettable characters. All are wrestling with issues of integrity, slf-prservation, and power in the same close confines of their coastal community, and tragedy is waiting to happen. Home from college for the summer...
Suddenly, thinking of Sara—as if she was right before him again at that moment—and thinking too of how she had walked way from the store, dragging her leg, he fell sideways against a rack of standard parts, lost his balance and tumbled downstairs, with the fridge crashing into him. But he knew in...
He stayed out almost an hour after the last of the two sleds went back up the hill, stamping logs with Estabrook’s stamp.There was a smell of tin in the air, prevalent close to the night, and the dreary sound of the wind against his parka, like snow scattering on tarpaper. It was at about four wh...
At night the balls were always being whacked into his door or against his window, and he would run to get them and toss them back to us. He had Michael shovel his driveway, and always came out to speak to us. Some nights he would stand in the cold for an hour in his T-shirt, his false teeth chatt...
Which made me think of myself as a Randolph Scott movie character, and had people being very nice to me. I see old pictures of me at that time now and realize how tiny I was for eight. I might have passed for five, with my left arm almost useless. Yet something in me must have been determined—for...
When Max scampered onto its shores in 1910, his pockets already laden with cash, his abilities fine-tuned, it was still one of the great powers in the world. It was still the greatest empire, at its twilight to be sure, but nevertheless, secure in itself and in all things British. Tolstoy says in...
is such a damnable word. In the middle-class lexicon “progressive” now means that most of the people I have known and loved are somehow less than others, who think and rationalize about compassion and fairness. As a case in point, I grew up with boys from rural New Brunswick who would bring their...
He played bingo, and tried to get businesses to donate money and commodities to his reserve. He had started a toys-for-tots program at the supermarkets in Chatham and Newcastle, and made sure three or four native children were sent to camp each summer from the Tim Hortons sponsor. Being chief and...