Paloma Van Tol
One Fish Town
Big Running in Newfoundland has been all but emptied of its inhabitants. Townsfolk have left this one-time fishing village to seek work further west, where the land is more populated and jobs ‘helping power the whole country’ are readily available. The Connor family is close to all that remains on this island of ‘always-there wind and always-there wave’, living a solitary and simple life amid the vast expanses of water and snow. What emerges from this environment are the makings of myth and seaman’s tales.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3