The Saints of Big Harbour (Paperback)

Starting with teenager Guy Boucher and his chaotic home life, Lynn Coady broadens her view to encompass a whole Nova Scotia community linked as much by tradition and memory as by the extraordinary violence which can suddenly erupt in their midst. In turn the characters relate their version of events and try to fathom their emotions. Guy resembles many young boys in his urgent wish to be taller and stronger, his lustful thoughts, boredom and impatience with certain teachers, but, when he tries to take a pretty girl out in his uncle Isadore's truck, everything goes wrong because Isadore is a vain, manipulative drunk who battens on his sister and wrecks everything he touches. Coady writes about teenagers with uncanny understanding: their friendships, language, self-loathing and, above all, their fantasies. In Guy she has created an appealing and innocent young man. The passages showing him at school, on the ice rink or learning to box are realistic and funny but she reserves her greatest skill for the touching domestic scenes where Guy tries to defend his home, his mother and his sister from Isadore's bullying. Coady has a rare talent for describing family life and never flinches from scenes which might seem outrageous. Each family in this small town seems strange and yet normal in a different way. She seizes on their quirks, their catchwords, their habits and the unnerving plight of their teenagers, struggling to find their way to adulthood. Isadore too is a triumph, a monster, a local character crashing his way from bar to home to a place where he can dry out once more. When a storm of wrong-headed innuendo and gossip threatens Guy the reader has developed such sympathy for him that the story threatens to become unbearably sad. Lynn Coady has already won several awards for her work; with this novel she keeps up her high standard. (Kirkus UK)

Award-winning Canadian author Coady's US debut tells intertwined stories of unhappy adolescents-and unhappier adults-as their lives collide in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s. Guy Boucher lives with his struggling-to-make-ends-meet mother, his older and mostly absent sister, and his all-too-present uncle Isadore in a rural French Canadian community outside the town of Big Harbour. Guy's home life is a disaster. Isadore is an alcoholic bully whose new drinking pal is Guy's English teacher, an American draft dodger. (Heavy drinking by the men here is a given and depressing constant except when they're up at the monastery drying out.) At a dance in Big Harbour, where the Scots look down on the French, Guy meets a town girl, Corrine, who lets him dance with her five times. He pursues her with puppylike optimism, not quite picking up on her lack of interest, let alone disdain. In fact, Corrine has her own problems. Although pretty and popular, she has concocted an elaborate fantasy life complete with an older boyfriend to impress her peers, especially her sensitive, less popular friend Pam. Pam, distressed already by her father's descent into alcoholism and joblessness, is distraught for Corrine, especially after she makes Guy sound like an obsessed stalker. Pam passes her fears for Corrine on to the even less popular, more desperate Ann. After Ann tells the gossip about Corrine to her brother, who happens to be attempting a friendship with Corrine's own seriously troubled brother, the former high school golden boys go on a vengeful, indiscriminate rampage. Meanwhile, Guy's mother moves with him into town to escape Isadore. Officially suspected though not exactly charged with molesting Corrine, Guy hides out with his now sober English teacher until the truth wins out. Rich and spicy, but an iffy plot and a little thick and slow to boil. (Kirkus Reviews)

Guy Boucher is a fatherless teenager oppressed by his small-town existence and dominated by his uncle, Isadore. Together with poverty and self-hatred, violence has been bred into Guy's very bones - and violence is one thing he can't shake off.