Traditions, created and subverted. Love, nurtured and destroyed. Friendships, marriages, and the wild beauty of Cape Breton Island. And above all, kin, in all its convoluted forms.
Beginning with Annie Macdonald, an effervescent seven-year-old living in Glace Bay in the 1930s, and ending with Annie's great-niece Hilary, an idealistic twenty-year-old in Round Island in 2000, Lesley Crewe's Kin is complex and riveting. The cast of characters is vast and varied—some with the island's deliciously cutting wit, some dour and uptight, some frail, some resilient, and all inextricably bound by their shared histories.
Brimming with humor and poignancy, Kin is a celebration of the heartbreaking, maddening joy that is family.
Lesley Crewe is the author of Her Mother's Daughter, Hit and Mrs., Ava Comes Home, Shoot Me, and Relative Happiness, which was shortlisted for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. Previously a freelance writer and columnist for Cape Bretoner magazine, she currently writes a column for Cahoots online magazine. Born in Montreal, Lesley lives in Homeville, Nova Scotia.