Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man... But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan O Donnell's lonely boat is eventually crammed with humor, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull. Brian Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea—and a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life's surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
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“Conrad, Stevenson, and Jack London come to mind, but so does the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez…The Plover sails delightfully on an imaginative sea of insight, compassion, and a kind of mystical grace.”
— Seattle Times
“Brian Doyle writes with Melville’s humor, Whitman’s ecstasy, and Faulkner’s run-on sentences…Few contemporary novels shimmer like this one.”
— Anthony Doerr, New York Times bestselling author“It is Doyle’s careful shaping of his characters’ internal landscapes that makes The Plover so unique…A novel of wondrous ideas worth mulling over.”
— OregonianA rare and unusual book and a brilliant, mystical exploration of the human spirit.
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Brian Doyle (1956–2017), author of The Plover, Grace Notes, Cat’s Foot, and many other books, was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. His many honors include three Pushcart Prizes and Foreword Reviews‘ Book of the Year Award. He won a Pacific Northwest Book Award in 2016 for his collection Children & Other Wild Animals. And in 2018 he was awarded that group’s Indie Spirit Honor in recognition of his body of work and vigorous support of independent booksellers in the Northwest and beyond.
David Drummond has made his living as an actor for over twenty-five years, appearing on stages large and small throughout the country and in Seattle, Washington, his hometown. He has narrated over thirty audiobooks, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, fantasy, military, thrillers, and humor. He received an AudioFile Earphones Award for his first audiobook, Love ’Em or Lose ’Em: Getting Good People to Stay. When not narrating, he keeps busy writing plays and stories for children.