The Custodian Of Paradise

Download or read book The Custodian of Paradise written by Wayne Johnston and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston’s breakthrough novel based on the life of Newfoundland’s first premier, Joe Smallwood, was published internationally and earned him nominations for the highest fiction prizes in Canada. One of the most highly praised elements of the novel is the character Sheilagh Fielding, with whom Smallwood shares a lifelong love-hate relationship. The Custodian of Paradise is a riveting narrative with Fielding at its heart. Fielding—advancing on middle age, hobbled by disfigurement and personal demons—is headed for Loreburn, a deserted island off the south coast of Newfoundland. She has borne a lifetime of estrangement and heartbreak by setting herself apart from the rest of St. John’s society. By cultivating her isolation, she’s been able to write, both in her journals and for the Telegram. By skirting Prohibition laws, she’s also been able to dull the pain of her early years. Alone she remains—except for the mysterious stranger she calls her Provider. As Fielding revisits her articles, letters and journals, we are swept up in her tumultuous life’s journey and the mystery of this Provider’s identity. From the downtrodden streets of New York’s immigrant neighbourhoods to the sanatorium where she fights TB, from the remote workers’ shacks of the Bonavista rail line to the underbelly of wartime St. John’s, the Provider seems to have devoted himself to charting Fielding’s every move and to sending her maddeningly cryptic letters about his role in her life. Yet he has also protected her at times. While she fears that he may have followed her to Loreburn, she fears even more that he may not be able to find her there. With The Custodian of Paradise, Wayne Johnston continues his masterful exploration of life in pre-Confederation Newfoundland, and of the powerful forces that give rise to great character—individualism, circumstance, and secrecy; memory, loss, and regret.

Download or read book The Custodian of Paradise: A Novel written by Wayne Johnston and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book-of-the-Month Club "Best Novel of 2007." In the waning days of World War II, Sheilagh Fielding makes her way to a deserted island off the coast of Newfoundland. But she soon comes to suspect another presence: that of a man known only as her Provider, who has shadowed her for twenty years.Against the backdrop of Newfoundland's history and landscape, Fielding is a compelling figure. Taller than most men and striking in spite of her crippled leg, she is both eloquent and subversively funny. Her newspaper columns exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of her native city, St. John's, have made many powerful enemies for her, chief among them the man who fathered her children—twins—when she was fourteen. Only her Provider, however, knows all of Fielding's secrets. Reading group guide included.

Download or read book The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams written by Wayne Johnston and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a Canadian bestseller, is a novel about Newfoundland that centres on the story of Joe Smallwood, the true-life controversial political figure who ushered the island through confederation with Canada and became its first premier. Narrated from Smallwood's perspective, it voices a deep longing on the part of the Newfoundlander to do something significant, “commensurate with the greatness of the land itself.” Smallwood’s chronicle of his development from poor schoolboy to Father of the Confederation is a story full of epic journeys and thwarted loves, travelling from the ice floes of the seal hunt to New York City, in a style reminiscent at times of John Irving, Robertson Davies and Charles Dickens. Absorbing and entertaining, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams provides us with a deep perspective on the relationship between private lives and what comes to be understood as history and shows, as E. Annie Proulx commented, “Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer.” The New York Times said, “this prodigious, eventful, character-rich book is a noteworthy achievement: a biting, entertaining and inventive saga.... a brilliant and bravura literary performance.”

Download or read book First Snow, Last Light written by Wayne Johnston and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the prizewinning and bestselling The Colony of Unrequited Dreams comes an epic family mystery with a powerful, surprise ending, and featuring the return of the ever-fascinating, always memorable Sheilagh Fielding. In the chill hush that precedes the first storm of the winter of 1936, 14-year-old Ned Vatcher comes home from school to find the house locked, the family car missing, and his parents gone without a trace. From that point on, his life is driven by the need to find out what happened to the Vanished Vatchers. His father, Edgar, born to a poor family of fishermen, had risen to become the right-hand man to the colony's prime minister, then suffered an unexpected fall from grace. Were he and his wife murdered? Was it suicide? Had they run away? If so, why had they left their only child behind? Ned soon finds himself enmeshed in another family, that of his missing father and the poverty from which the man somehow escaped. His grandparents, Nan and Reg, his Uncle Cyril and others, are themselves haunted by the inexplicable disappearance of a third Vatcher, a young man who was lost at sea on a calm and sunny day years earlier. As Ned becomes Newfoundland's first media mogul and builds an empire to insulate him from loss, two other people loom large in his life: a Jesuit priest named Father Duggan, and Sheilagh Fielding, a boozy giantess who, while wandering the city streets at night, composes satiric columns that scandalize the rich and powerful. In Ned, Fielding sees a surrogate for her two lost children, while Ned believes the enigmatic Fielding to be his soulmate. The novel builds to a spectacular resolution of the mystery of all the Vanished Vatchers, with these larger-than-life, mythic characters embroiled in events that leave us contemplating not only their tragedies and triumphs, but the forces that compel us all to act in ways that surprise and sometimes terrify us.

Download or read book Awake written by Harald Voetmann and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.

Download or read book The Mystery of Right and Wrong written by Wayne Johnston and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "An absolutely unforgettable novel."—Ian Williams A masterwork from one of the country’s most critically acclaimed and beloved writers that grapples with male violence, sexual abuse, and madness. Complusively readable and heartstopping. Wade Jackson, a young man from a Newfoundland outport, wants to be a writer. In the university library in St. John’s, where he goes every day to absorb the great books of the world, he en­counters the fascinating, South African-born Rachel van Hout, and soon they are lovers. Rachel is the youngest of four van Hout daugh­ters, each in their own way a wounded soul. The old­est, Gloria, has a string of broken marriages behind her. Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaner dealer husband can lay his hands on. Betha­ny, the most sardonic of the sisters, is fighting a los­ing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads The Diary of Anne Frank obsessively, and diarizes her days in a secret language of her own invention, writing to the point of breakdown and beyond—an obsession that has deeper and more dis­turbing roots than Wade could ever have imagined. Confronting the central mystery of his character Rachel’s life—and his own—Wayne Johnston has created a brilliant and searing tour de force that pulls the reader toward a conclusion both inevitable and impossible to fore­see.

Download or read book A Fool's Paradise written by Anita Konkka and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overeducated, unemployed, recently dumped, and depressed, the 38-year-old nameless narrator is a familiar American character, except she's Finnish. It is the 1980s, her married Russian lover has recently left her, and the narrator compulsively writes in her journal as she tries to put her life back together. Obsessed with omens, astrology, dreams, fortune-tellers, and other objects of the paranormal, the narrator is both funny and morose.