Michael Crummey Books in Order

Stories centered on a Newfoundland mining town follow people estranged from family, home, or themselves. Journeys farther afield extend the collection's concern with belonging, as its characters alternately seek a place in the world and try to escape one.

Drawing on his father's accounts of Newfoundland outports and the Labrador fishery, Crummey reimagines an earlier coastal world. Generations of voices evoke difficult work, harsh weather, endurance, humor, and affection within lives shaped by the sea.

Expeditions ordered by the British Crown bring Newfoundland settlers into consequential contact with the Beothuk. As the missions' tragic effects unfold, secrets within the settler community emerge, revealing the personal conflicts entwined with a people's disappearance.

Photographs and personal reflections trace Newfoundland's transition from a fishing society toward an economy shaped by oil and minerals. Crummey draws on family memory to explore disappearing traditions, continued belonging, and the resilience of a changing island culture.

In wartime Newfoundland, Catholic Wish and Protestant Sadie begin a romance opposed by her family. He leaves for military service and she believes him dead, until a return to the island fifty years later forces her to confront their unfinished past.

Across two centuries, the Sellers and Devine families shape life in an isolated Newfoundland settlement. Their alliances, feuds, and romances unfold in a harsh coastal world where local stories blur the boundary between everyday experience and the supernatural.

Poems move between childhood and middle age, examining love, marriage, grief, embarrassment, and ordinary encounters with mortality. Newfoundland settings and everyday rituals provide points of departure for reflections on loss, desire, and unexpected forms of consolation.

When the government offers island residents money to resettle only if everyone agrees, Moses Sweetland refuses to leave. As neighbors depart, his struggle to remain becomes bound to the community's memories, history, and threatened way of life.

New poems join selections from four earlier collections in an exploration of human connection. Adolescence, mature love, fathers and sons, desire, and absence reveal the relationships that sustain people and the lasting effects of those who are gone.

Crummey examines the boundary between factual history and invented narrative through his own experience writing fiction. His reflections consider what novelists owe readers and real people when transforming historical lives and cultural material into stories.

Orphaned in a remote Newfoundland cove, a brother and sister try to survive with a family boat and fragmentary knowledge of the world. Seasons of scarcity, illness, and hardship test the fierce loyalty that binds them as they grow older.

Two rival merchants in an isolated Newfoundland outport wage an increasingly bitter feud after a sabotaged wedding. Their struggle for power and revenge divides a community already vulnerable to storms, disease, and the precarious northern fishery.