![]() ![]() ![]() They subsist on little food, live through brutal winters, and Evered faces the perils of the sea when he goes out fishing. The novel becomes the story of the siblings’ survival, often against incredible odds. ![]() “The cove was the heart and sum of all creation in their eyes and they were alone there with the little knowledge of the world passed on haphazard and gleaned by chance.” The Innocents begins sometime in the early 1800s with Ada and Evered, a young sister and brother left alone together in their home on an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s north coast when their parents die from an illness. At least, that is technically the case: a lack of distinction between history and the present has always been part of Crummey’s work, which is more interested in how each informs the other. The Book of Genesis meets “Hansel and Gretel” by way of Flowers in the Attic: that would not be an inappropriate way to situate Michael Crummey’s new novel, a return to historical fiction following 2014’s Sweetland. ![]()
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