In the 1920s, Janie McLeary and George King run one of the first movie theatres in the Maritimes. The marriage of the young Irish Catholic woman to an older English man is thought scandalous, but they work happily together, playing music to accompany the films. When George succumbs to illness and dies, leaving Janie with one young child and another on the way, the unscrupulous Joey Elias tries to take over the business. But Janie guards the theatre with a shotgun, and still in mourning, re-opens it herself. “If there was no real bliss in Janie’s life,” recounts her grandson, “there were moments of triumph.”
One night, deceived by the bank manager and Elias into believing she will lose her mortgage, Janie resolves to go and ask for money from the Catholic houses. Elias has sent out men to stop her, so she leaps out the back window and with a broken rib she swims in the dark across the icy Miramichi River, doubting her own sanity. Yet, seeing these people swayed into immoral actions because of their desire to please others and their fear of being outcast, she thinks to herself that “...all her life she had been forced to act in a way uncommon with others... Was sanity doing what they did? And if it was, was it moral or justified to be sane?”
Astonishingly, she finds herself face to face that night with influential Lord Beaverbrook, who sees in her tremendous character and saves her business. Not only does she survive, she prospers; she becomes wealthy, but ostracized. Even her own father helps Elias plot against her. Yet Janie McLeary King thwarts them and brings first-run talking pictures to the town.
Meanwhile, she employs Rebecca from the rival Druken family to look after her children. Jealous, and a protégé of Elias, Rebecca mistreats her young charges. The boy Miles longs to be a performer, but Rebecca convinces him he is hated, and he inherits his mother’s enemies. The only person who truly loves her, he is kept under his mother’s influence until, eventually, he takes a job as the theatre’s projectionist. He drinks heavily all his life, tends his flowers, and talks of things no-one believes, until the mystery at the heart of the novel finally unravels.
“At six I began to realize that my father was somewhat different,” says Miles King’s son Wendell, who narrates the saga in an attempt to find answers in the past and understand “how I was damned.” It is a many-layered epic of rivalries, misunderstandings, rumours; the abuse of power, what weak people will do for love, and the true power of doing right; of a pioneer and her legacy in the lives of her son and grandchildren.
“David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive,” wrote Lynn Coady in the Vancouver Sun. From this winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award comes a story of a woman’s determined struggle against small town prejudice, and her son’s long battle against deceit. Richards’ own family ran Newcastle’s Uptown Theatre from 1911 to 1980, and Janie is based on his grandmother. Cast upon this history is a drama that explores morality and “the question of how one should live,” as The Atlantic Monthly said of Mercy Among the Children, his previous novel.
Reviewers agree that Richards’ fiction sits firmly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by concerning itself explicitly with good and evil and the human freedom to choose between them. Once again, in River of the Brokenhearted, his twelfth novel, Richards has created a work of compassion and assured, poetic sophistication which finds in the hearts of its characters venality and goodwill, cruelty and love.
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“Richards is a painfully sharp observer, who possesses one of the most distinct and compelling voices in contemporary literature.” -- Toronto Star
“[A] century from now readers will discover in Richards’ novels the same heartbreaking treasures we find in the novels of Thomas Hardy.” -- Kitchener-Waterloo Record
Born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, the third of six children, David Adams Richards found his calling at the age of fourteen after reading Oliver Twist. He had never read a novel before, and was first disappointed that there were no pictures. Then he picked up the Dickens novel almost by accident one day, and after reading it was determined to become a novelist.
He studied literature at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, attended an informal weekly writing workshop, received encouragement from established writers and published a book of poetry. When the first five chapters of the novel he was working on, The Coming of Winter, won the Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing in 1973, he left university to write full-time; the book was published the following year, and translated into Russian.
He then pursued a life of writing with extraordinary resolve, in spite of the small rewards early on. Leaving university without a degree meant giving up the possibility of an academic career. Instead, he took ticket stubs at his father’s theatre in Newcastle; “I came from a family that did all right, but after I got out on my own, from age 19 to 27, I had almost no money. I cut my own wood for the winter with an axe one year.” For his first five novels, he didn’t have a reading outside his province of New Brunswick.
However, in 1985 his fifth work of fiction, Road to the Stilt House, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, and soon he was recognised as one of the ten best Canadian writers under 45. In 1988 he won the Governor General’s Award for Nights Below Station Street, and was named by Maclean’s magazine as a Canadian who made a difference; he began to win various other literary awards. Ten years later he won a second Governor General’s Award for his memoir Lines on the Water, becoming one of only three writers to win for both fiction and non-fiction (along with Mordecai Richler and Hugh MacLennan).
Still, it was not until his 2000 novel Mercy Among the Children that he made a real breakthrough internationally; the novel received effusive praise and was a national bestseller for months. The epic story of a man’s pact with God and its far-reaching impact on his family’s destiny, it was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award, and won the prestigious Giller Prize. In the U.S., it was given the Editors’ Choice award by The Atlantic Monthly. The Washington Post called it “a contemporary masterpiece that, in the tradition of Tolstoy, Camus and Melville, reminds us that redemption is to be found in the suffering of innocents.”
Like his literary heroes Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte, Richards evokes universal human struggles through the events of a small, rural place, where one person’s actions impact inevitably on others in a web of interconnectedness. The TLS, comparing Richards to Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence and Alistair MacLeod, says, “Like them, Richards is a regional writer, but not in a limiting sense; circumscription of place concentrates and clarifies the universal issues of motive and moral responsibility.”
Each of his sixteen books of poetry, essays and fiction is set in rural communities of New Brunswick’s Miramichi Valley. After years of travelling, Richards found he could write about the region regardless of where he lived; he says, “I carry what I do inside.” He portrays real rural men and women, brilliant and strong characters in spite of their deprived lives, sometimes based on people he grew up with. Wayne Johnston, hearing Richards read in 1983, was struck by the author’s unqualified love for all his characters.
Richards’ meditation on fishing, Lines on the Water, and his earlier book Hockey Dreams, reflect enduring childhood passions; his interests beyond literature and history are hockey, boxing, hunting, and fly-fishing on the Miramichi River. His love for the place and its people permeates his work, while his belief in the existence of good and evil and human choice between them, his ability to catch what Maclean’s magazine called “the beauty and loneliness of the search for moral truth,” gives it an uplifting quality. He admits there are hard lessons in his books, but hopes there is joyousness too. “It’s more optimistic than not.”
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Da: The Book Scouts, Sanborn, NY, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condizione: Fine. Condizione sovraccoperta: Fine. First Edition. We're happy to combine shipping to save you some money. We're also always buying collectible book collections. Contact us for details. We're happy to provide pictures of any and all books for you, please just ask! Canadian first edition, first printing. Published by Doubleday Canada in 2003. Contains numberline 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Jacket is in Near Fine condition. Back of jacket has a very light 2 inch crease to top. Jacket is NOT price clipped. Covers are clean and bright. Edges are sharp. No tears or creases. The book itself is in Near Fine condition with no bumps or marks. The binding is straight and tight. NO remainder mark. Oversize and heavy items may require additional postage. Codice articolo sku520003894
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Da: Hourglass Books, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Soft cover. Condizione: Very Good. Advance Reading Copy. Some edge wear to card covers and one rubbed spot at upper left corner of front cover; otherwise a solid, clean copy with no marking or underlining; collectible condition. Book. Codice articolo 004844
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Da: Hourglass Books, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Hardcover. Condizione: Very Good+. Condizione sovraccoperta: Very Good+, Not Price Clipped. Canadian First. First edition, first printing as evidenced by a complete number line from 1 to 10; both signed by David Adams Richards and inscribed by him on the title page: "For __, All the best, DAR;" minor edge wear; otherwise a solid, clean copy in collectable condition; dust jacket is protected by a Brodart sleeve. Signed by Author(s). Book. Codice articolo 000867
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Da: Russell Books, Victoria, BC, Canada
Hardcover. Condizione: Good. Condizione sovraccoperta: Good. 1st Edition, 1st Printing. Codice articolo FORT438008
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Da: Russell Books, Victoria, BC, Canada
Hardcover. Condizione: Good. 1St Edition. Bargain book!. Codice articolo X000083
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Da: Joy of Books, Etobicoke, ON, Canada
Hardcover. Condizione: Fine. 1st Edition. This exceptional book by the Giller Prize and Governor General award winning author is yet another masterpiece. Set in northern New Brunswick it is a" magnificent and haunting story about the entwinement of remembered love and unforgotten hate." Ex-library copy with one stamp on fly leaf, top edge, and 2 outside cover markings. But in very good condition - probably not signed out much! Some edgewear, slight yellow stain on fly, but clean, whole, pages intact and spine sound. Codice articolo 001321
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Da: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condizione: As New. No Jacket. Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.58. Codice articolo G0385658877I2N00
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Da: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condizione: As New. No Jacket. Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.58. Codice articolo G0385658877I2N00
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Da: BISON BOOKS - ABAC/ILAB, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
Hardcover. pp. 381. 8vo. Bound in grey cloth with silver lettering to spine. Lightest edgewear; very good+ in very good+ dustjacket. Signed by author at title page. Codice articolo 044767
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Da: Laurel Reed Books, Stratford, ON, Canada
Hardcover. Condizione: Very Good. Condizione sovraccoperta: Very Good. 1st. P.O. name neatly written top right corner ffep, else clean. Another sad engaging tale from the Faulkner of the Miramichi. Codice articolo 012098
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