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“Michael Crummey is a passionate storyteller. His world is intensely imagined and starkly real. Life leaps off the pages of Galore.”
— Jane Mendelsohn, New York Times bestselling author
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“[An] expansive yarn…in lilting prose.”
— New Yorker
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“This is the book that will win Crummey a permanent place in American readers’ hearts. With Galore he has done something much more besides writing a compulsively readable book. He has created an unforgettable place of the imagination. Paradise Deep belongs on the same literary map as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and García Márquez’s Macondo.”
— Boston Globe
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“Like the two-faced ocean they pull their living from, Crummey’s characters in this multigenerational unwinding are icy and surprising. 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.”
— Washington Post
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“A glittering, fabulist tale…Reminiscent of the work of Jean Giono, particularly Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Galore is a tale in which humans are confronted with the miraculous.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“In grand language and colorful storytelling, Michael Crummey traces through several generations the fortunes of two families from the outport of Paradise Deep in Newfoundland…This is a book to savor. You won’t want to miss any of its delights: the tightly braided narrative skeins, the pathos and humor of the characters, the exotic flavor of a long ago time and place.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
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“Michael Crummey’s Galore is a fabulous, fable-filled ball of yarns such as I’ve never encountered before. Tall but plausible tales, odd, eccentric but weirdly familiar characters, dialogue straight out of the mouths of outport Newfoundlanders, historicized fiction, fictionalized history—it has, as its title suggests, a superabundance of good things. This is art, but not art full of solemn, self-importance. Galore is artfully, and seriously, entertaining.”
— Wayne Johnston, bestselling author
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“It’s an incredibly difficult task to make characters such as these work as human beings as well as elements of folklore, and Crummey does it with as much skill and grace as Gabriel Garcia Márquez does in One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
— Globe and Mail
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“Pitch-perfect, boisterous…Galore is an endearing romp. For the language alone—and there is so much more—I loved the book.”
— National Post
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“This economically told epic is masterful, written by a man with enough confidence to let his readers interpolate the meaning not only of certain words, but entire character arcs.”
— Toronto Star
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“Michael Crummey’s third novel injects an element of magic realism to convey an otherworldly quality…a dense, intricate, and absorbing tale, rich in the nuances of human relationships.”
— Quill & Quire
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“Galore is an absolute pleasure. In Crummey’s capable hands, the setting breeds magic…A complex narrative that feels effortless, yet is woven so tightly that the magnificent artistry of its creator cannot be ignored.”
— Walrus
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“Mythic and gorgeous…Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters’ lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Newfoundland author Crummey’s award-winning third novel…affirms that our lives are always astonishing. It’s been justly compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also calls to mind Graham Swift’s Waterland and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, as well as William Faulkner’s epic Compson novels, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed those works.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“In a sweeping story of several generations, Galore reveals the lives of the Irish and West Country English in rugged Newfoundland…The novel sizzles with an edge of the fantastic as Crummey keeps the action going while circling around to reveal back-story…Capturing the speech and temper of a primitive world, and communicating it perfectly, the writer delivers a masterpiece.”
— ForeWord Reviews
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“Ghosts, gangsters, mermen, and a Christ-like healer who emerges from the belly of a beached whale are among the attractions in a boisterous, one-of-a-kind folk epic about feuding intermarried clans in Newfoundland…A lively, eccentric, mythmaking novel inspired by two hundred years of Canadian history."
— Kirkus Reviews
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“Crummey’s ambitious story of immigrant settlement, family alliances and clashes, heroism and failure is deeply moving and disquieting, sure to make some waves.”
— Booklist