I'm glad that I didn't read any reviews of this book before I started it if I had, I probably would never have picked it up. He has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada for Galore.

Michael Crummey is a poet and storyteller, as well as the author of the critically acclaimed novels River Thieves and The Wreckage and the short-story collection Flesh and Blood. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us. With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm in which the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish but remarkably alive.

Galore michael crummey book review