What a strange little book.

Moses Sweetland is an old man who has lived on a tiny island in the North Atlantic for all but a few months of his life. When the Canadian government wants to relocate everybody on the island to the mainland Moses resists and ultimately takes drastic steps to remain on the island.

We learn about all the quirky characters on the island of Sweetland, we learn about why Moses leads such a solitary life, and we learn his ultimate fate.

I really felt like I got to know the old coot and I'm glad to have spent the hours with him that I did.


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This book has been on my shelf for a while; I didn't plan on reading it during quarantine but here we are. A piercing story of isolation and memory. Tragic but not in the over-dramatic way of so many novels. The character of landscape and community was well-developed, but I was well through the first section before I started to like it; when I realized what that development was for. Someone referred to this as an elegy for vanishing and I can't say it any better. ( )

Protagonist Moses Sweetland lives in a small community on an island off the coast of Newfoundland. The island is named Sweetland after Moses’s ancestors. The government has offered to relocate the residents if they all agree to move to the mainland. Moses becomes the lone holdout, which makes him a target for abuse by the other residents. He has previously been a fisherman and a lighthouse keeper, but fishing was outlawed (due to overfishing) and the lighthouse was automated.

One of the highlights is the relationship between Moses and Jesse, the teenage son of his niece. Jesse has autism and enjoys listening to Moses’s stories. Moses eventually figures out how to get what he wants, but at a terrible cost. It is a sad story, full of loneliness. The message seems to be that adapting to change and neighbors helping each other are important to survival. Crummey writes in a way that calls to mind a vanishing way of life. I very much enjoyed this book, but it is not cheery.
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fiction (modern day Newfoundland, man with autistic grand-nephew) ( )

I'm torn: this is an excellent piece of fiction: subtle, engaging, original... but one not to be read after over a year of pandemic. The themes of isolation, despair and abandonment hit too close to home, which is really a testimony to the author's talent of conveying these moods. So adroit is he in his descriptions that I could feel myself walking through the village and across the island just like the ghost inhabitants of the past.
Spooky, endearing, touching and heartfelt, this novel is worth a read. Reserve it for lighter days. ( )