The Town That Forgot How To Breathe

'A novel of dazzling ambition and strange, haunting loveliness. Grippingly entertaining and bursting with life, it is an absolute triumph of the storyteller's art. Many books are hyped as "unputdownable". This one really is' Joseph O'Connor

A novel of dazzling ambition and strange, haunting loveliness. Grippingly entertaining and bursting with life, it is an absolute triumph of the storyteller's art. Many books are hyped as "unputdownable". This one really is.

Kenneth J. Harvey is the author of several novels, including Brud and The Hole That Must Be Filled. Nine Tenths Unseen was praised by J. M. Coetzee as 'a harrowing journey into the dark underside of family life'. Kenneth J. Harvey lives in Newfoundland.

Bareneed, Newfoundland, home to a vivid cast of characters who, one by one, come down with a mysterious breathing disorder. As the illness progresses, its victims fall into silence and are gripped by dark thoughts and urges. Meanwhile, the once-thriving cod fishery has been shut down and people find their nets full of bizarre creatures - the incarnations of legendary beasts and characters that existed in the village's tales for generations. One old-timer, Eileen Laracy, gradually makes the connection: the act of breathing is no longer automatic for the inhabitants of Bareneed - out of place and time, they have lost a fundamental part of their identity.

Kenneth J Harvey

BLACKSTRAP HAWCO is a story of Newfoundland from its beginnings to its present, and stretching forward to its future. The intensely physical lives of Blackstrap Hawco and his people are as vivid as the blood they spill. The book is gripping and painful but redeemed by love. Kenneth J. Harvey demonstrates the pulse of what it means to be alive.

Named in a moment of anger, raised to endure the tragedy of a people and culture coming undone, Blackstrap Hawco is heir to an island dominion subsumed, picked over and set adrift by its adoptive nation. 
 
As the end of the twentieth century nears, the Hawco family's bloodlines have grown tainted and confused. Men fail their families through enforced idleness, and the once-vivid ghosts of their ancestors have slipped into murk, forgotten along with the rest of history. 
 
Blackstrap Hawco is a defiant man born with little more than a body and spirit that refuse to give up, and the menacing strength of pride. For the Hawcos of Newfoundland, was it not ever so? 
 
From the arrivals of the indentured Irish to the Victorian drawing rooms of the English merchants, from the perilous adventures of the seal hunt to the raucous iron ore mines, from a notorious disaster at sea to the relocation of outport communities, the Hawco story might be all the family has left. But as Blackstrap Hawco - a novel that will consume you in its dazzling swirl of voices, legends and beautiful hearsay - testifies, a story this haunting, this powerful, might just be enough.

Kenneth J Harvey

Praise for Blackstrap Hawco

BLACKSTRAP HAWCO is a story of Newfoundland from its beginnings to its present, and stretching forward to its future. The intensely physical lives of Blackstrap Hawco and his people are as vivid as the blood they sp ...

Books by Kenneth J Harvey

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