Gaff topsails

Set over a single day in 1948, this debut novel follows the residents of an Irish Catholic fishing village on Newfoundland's coast. The day is June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist, when people light bonfires on the headlands to mark the occasion. Father MacMurrough has only just arrived in the village and feels isolated, and his thoughts keep returning to a love affair that ended badly.

The novel moves among the villagers. Michael Barron, a young man who cannot speak, has fallen in love, yet his life begins to feel as perilous as the great iceberg he and his friends climb over. His younger brother Kevin, devout to an anxious degree, is tormented by whispers of monsters and sins he imagines he has committed. Mary, a dreamy teenager, performs old pagan Midsummer rituals hoping to glimpse the husband she will one day marry. A woman on a rooftop above the sea rocks her infant while she waits for her fisherman husband to come home, and Old Johnny, the lighthouse keeper, drinks his way through the day, still troubled by what he has lived through.

Hovering over all of them is the village's founder, an Irish castaway and the son of a monk who died five centuries earlier. The novel suggests that his presence still lingers in the people of the community in the middle of the twentieth century.