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Sylvanus Now is a young man of great charm and strength, most at home when fishing the great Newfoundland fishing banks. His world is simple, his desires direct. He wants Adelaide, a fiery beauty from the next village, but Adelaide swore she would never love a fisherman. She hates the sea, the fish, the prying eyes of an isolated 1950s community.
But as their love for each other grows into marriage, the more they seem linked to the rhythms of the sea – a sea that takes as well as gives, something that Sylvanus knows all too well having lost both his brother and father to the depths. Worse is to come. Looming at the edge of the horizon are menacing congregations of giant fishing trawlers that threaten to suck not only fish from the sea but the life from a community.
But as their love for each other grows into marriage, the more they seem linked to the rhythms of the sea – a sea that takes as well as gives, something that Sylvanus knows all too well having lost both his brother and father to the depths. Worse is to come. Looming at the edge of the horizon are menacing congregations of giant fishing trawlers that threaten to suck not only fish from the sea but the life from a community.
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Reviews
This is a novel about change - change on the land, and on the sea, and within the human heart. It is about redemption, and it is breathtakingly beautiful. There are detailed descriptions in this novel which are dazzlingly authentic. Both physical and emotional landscapes are charted with exquisite care. A splendidly unique novel
'Donna Morrissey's SYLVANUS NOW pulses with feeling and the roar of the sea . . . Morrissey summons energy and passion to invest this clash of the old versus the new with an epic quality - and succeeds. Reminiscent of Annie Proulx, the writing is poised, charged and tactile, almost biblical in places, effortlessly evoking the texture of the fish, the smells, the back-breaking work and a community under pressure'
'Morrissey's people ...assume a near-mythic intensity . . . Absorbing human drama, in Morrissey's best yet'