Lines On The Water

Lines on the Water is a great book about fishing.  The last fishy book on the YJ list was Thomas McGuane's The Longest Silence, which was hailed as an instant classic and has sold nearly 10,000 copies in paperback.

Like Hardy before him, Richards seems determined not only to dignify the inhabitants of his native rural community, but to give them a universal significance as well

David Adams Richards is one of Canada's most celebrated writers.  He has won the highly prestigious Governor General's Award twice  and was joint winner of the Giller Prize with Michael Ondaatje. His novel Mercy Among the Children was published to great acclaim by Jonathan Cape in 2001.  He lives not far from the Miramichi river with his wife and two sons.

'A poetic account of the dialogue Richards has conducted with the river during half a century of listening to the whisper and gurgle of its myriad voices - a lyrical evocation of the sights, sounds and scents of a great Canadian waterway' - The Sunday HeraldLines on the Water is the story of a town, its river and the community of people who fish in it.  David Adams Richards is a prize-winning author but when he's not writing, he's mostly fishing and when he's fishing it's always along the banks of the Miramichi river.  This great river and the poachers, guides, visiting city suits and friends who share it with him have woven themselves into the fabric of his life and in Lines on the Water he pays tribute to them all.  Spinning fishy tale after glorious fishy tale we join him and his companions on the endless search for the next great fishing pool and along the way remember why we love to read, and why we have to fish.

Mercy Among The Children

'One of the great novels of our time' Alistair MacLeod

Like Hardy before him, Richards seems determined not only to dignify the inhabitants of his native rural community, but to give them a universal significant as well

Astonishing... fiercely imagined and brilliantly rendered

This is a book that is redolent of Annie Proulx in its elegiac narrative, while achieving a depth of touch that feels truthful, individual and glorious

David Adams Richards was born in 1950. He has won many awards for his novels and is one of only three writers ever to have won both the fiction and non-fiction categories of the Governor General's Award. He lives in Toronto.

The novel tells the story of Sydney Henderson and his son, Lyle. As a young man, Sydney, believing he has accidentally killed a friend, makes a pact with God, promising never to harm another if the boy's life is spared. In the years that follow the almost pathologically gentle Sydney tries to hold true to his promise - at terrible cost to himself and his family.

River of the Brokenhearted

'A compelling picture of tragedy and thwarted lives, as old sins poison new generations' - Observer

A superlative new novel by 'the greatest Canadian writer alive'

David Adams Richards' characters achieve redemption through affliction, but the reader does not feel afflicted

David Adams Richards, born in New Brunswick, Canada, is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and poet. His novels include Mercy Among the Children, which won the 2000 Giller Prize;The Bay of Love and Sorrows, which was made into a feature film; and the award-winning Nights Below Station Street.

Janie McCleary runs one of the first movie theatres in New Brunswick. A successful woman in a world of men, she is ostracized, a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. She trusts no one outside her family. 
 
Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life of this formidable woman, a pioneer before the age of feminism, and her legacy as it unfolds tragically in the lives of her son and grandchildren. Written with aching compassion and masterful sophistication, River of the Brokenhearted muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of these extraordinary characters. 
 
By the author of Mercy Among the Children.

David Adams Richards

An engrossing well-drawn tale - but one with a bleakness of soul as uncompromising as the Canadian wilderness

Canada has produced more than its fair share of brilliant writers. David Adams Richards might not be as successful an export as Margaret Atwood or the late Saul Bellow, but he's impressive nonetheless... An evocative tale of fate and small-town life, it's filled with drama, bawdy wit and echoes of Thomas Hardy

Will Jameson has a temperament of iron, standing up to men twice his age when he takes over the Jameson lumber company after his father's death. His younger brother Owen is sensitive, literary and fanciful. But when Will dies suddenly and Owen's beloved Lula rejects him, Owen's deeper character comes to light: joining the army in the hope of getting himself killed, instead Owen returns home a decorated war hero. 
 
Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia - the wife of Will's old friend Reggie Glidden - and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town's gossip and hypocrisy. Inexorably, they are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance and a sensational trial. 
 
The Friends of Meager Fortune is a transfixing love story and a devastating portrait of a society - but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world, that of the lumberjacks who felled the trees by hand and dragged them down mountainsides with horses. Owen Jameson begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in pitiless ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him. 
 
Rich with all the passion, ambition and almost mythic vision that defines David Adams Richards' work, The Friends of Meager Fortune is a profound and important book about the hands and the heart; about true greatness and true weakness; about the relentlessness of fate and the evil that men and women do. Wise, stark, and without a false word in it, it cements David Adams Richards' claim to be the finest novelist at work in Canada today.

David Adams Richards

Praise for The Friends of Meager Fortune

An engrossing well-drawn tale - but one with a bleakness of soul as uncompromising as the Canadian wilderness

Canada has produced more than its fair share of brilliant writers. David Adams Richards might not be as successful an export as Margaret Atwood or the late Saul Bellow, but he's impressive nonetheless... An evoca ...

Books by David Adams Richards

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