Causeway

From the Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishop’s Man comes a bestselling classic childhood memoir, full of humour and heartache, set in Cape Breton Island

Linden MacIntyre remembers vividly the day construction started on the causeway. September 15, 1952, was the day that Change—always for the better and always from away—arrived to link his small Cape Breton village with the wide world of the mainland. With its grand promises of jobs and riches and progress, the building of the Canso Causeway also became a potent personal icon for MacIntyre, the road that would bring him closer to the father who was always away.

In a highly evocative memoir—at once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a luminous reflection on fathers and sons—MacIntyre fills his pages with vivid characters. From his grandmother, the Gaelic-speaking Peigeag, who, it was rumoured, had “special powers” that could both cure and curse, to Dan Rory, the father MacIntyre struggles to know and love, these are people who inhabit a time and a place that is on the brink of transformation. No one knows this more than MacIntyre, his narrative voice ringing true on every page, the voice of a young boy both mystified and captivated by the worlds he straddles.

Shot through with humour and humanity, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that sets a new standard for the genre.