It takes nearly an hour (and a stomach-pumping that produces seven small fish) before anyone on the shore believes the man, Judah, is actually alive. His flesh - so white that neither lips nor nipples are detectable - reeks of sour and decayed fish. Into this scene enters a man most astonishing, birthed into the ocean from a slit in the whale’s belly. Then the ugly work of hacking up blubber, carting away the liver and heart, and rendering oil begins. A slow leak of blood stains the water until the whale stops breathing. Hungry villagers wait with knives, axes and saws ready on the gray and freezing shore, unwilling to hurry the majestic creature’s death. Romance exists here in many forms: unrequited, closeted, obsessive and even loving, but there are many forces more powerful than love in Crummey’s Labrador - primarily, the sea. The novel is populated by crazy, hateful couplings that more closely resemble animal husbandry than marriage. It is not the harsh weather alone that warps these characters. The denizens of Paradise Deep and its neighboring town, the Gut, end up as twisted as the wind-tortured trees, making for a quirky quilt of personalities that might remind a reader of Annie Proulx’s “ The Shipping News.” The families of two colorfully nicknamed characters - King-me Sellers, so-called because he owns the only checkerboard in town and Devine’s Widow, a potent crone - mingle, fightand marry. Like the two-faced ocean they pull their living from, Crummey’s characters in this multi-generational unwinding are icy and surprising.

“The sap of backcountry spruce froze solid and exposed stands shattered like glass in the winter winds, the noise of the chandelier disasters carried for miles on the frost.”Crummey, a resident of Newfoundland, will delight readers who like to plumb the depths of northern bleakness: families surviving, or not, on potatoes and salt mothers who have planted gardens of children and a beautiful young woman who insists on having all her healthy teeth pulled out so that they won’t cause her trouble later.

Michael Crummey’s novel “ Galore” is set in coastal Labrador, a captivating place, unfamiliar to most readers, that allows for thrilling and chilling descriptions of the cold.

Galore michael crummey summary