The Innocents

**From prizewinning author Michael Crummey comes a spellbinding story of survival in which a brother and sister confront the limits of human endurance and their own capacity for loyalty and forgiveness.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 GILLER PRIZE, GOVERNOR GENERAL'S PRIZE AND WRITER'S TRUST FICTION AWARD



**

The Innocents is richly imagined and compulsively readable. A riveting story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister. Electrifying and heartbreaking, it is a testament to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of our individual selves.

In centuries past, a brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. With only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to help them survive.

Enduring the severe round of the seasons, years of meagre catches, storms and ravaging illness, only their fierce loyalty to each other motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.



MICHAEL CRUMMEY was born in Buchans, a mining town in the interior of Newfoundland, growing up there and in western Labrador. After thirteen years in self-imposed exile in Ontario, he moved home to Newfoundland in 2000. He is the author of five books of poetry, a book of short stories, and four other celebrated novels, including the Giller prize-nominated River Thieves. He lives in St. John's.



'Crummey does a powerfully unsettling job of imagining how the onset of sexual feelings and self-consciousness would affect an isolated brother and sister'



'Brilliantly written. Different. Unique.'



'This is a vivid reimagining of nature and a study of intimacy, involving and compassionate'



'Beautifully written [...] It is an unusual book that will stay with me for a long time'



'Beautiful, brutal and raw [...] Inspired by a story the author found in local archives, this is an incredibly haunting novel - the language powerfully pure, the story uniquely thought-provoking'