Galore

Set in Paradise Deep, Newfoundland, this novel chronicles the intertwined lives and loves of two families, the uncanny Devines and the gentrified Sellers, over two centuries. Crummey's prose is glorious throughout, unflinchingly honest and unsentimentally magical. Here, supernatural episodes and anecdotes share the page with naturalistic descriptions of people, physical afflictions, weather, and landscape, and the veil separating life and death is nigh transparent. "Now the once," utters one character near the novel's conclusion, beautifully conveying how past and future meet in the present, a notion Crummey subtly emphasizes by opening and closing the novel with miraculous accounts and linking inhabitants of Paradise Deep to totems—a Bible, a whale carcass—that persist from one generation to the next as they diminish. The effect is dazzling.