A Forest for Calum

From the back page of my copy printed in 2005" The setting is Cape Breton Island: the themes of cultural and rural change and decline are universal. " In a 2006 newspaper clipping Frank says regarding his nomination " I can't pretend it is not important because this is a collection of the best writing in the world last year, so to be among them is no small thing. "

It's the 1950s in a declining coal town on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. Roddie Gillies, his parents dead, is being raised by his grandfather Calum, a dour carpenter who "walks like a funeral." Nothing is stable: Roddie becomes a young man, the mine closes, and Calum sees the fading not only of the town, but of the Gaelic-speaking world that surrounded it. Macdonald writes as though telling you the story at his kitchen table, tea in the kettle and oatcakes on the plate. You don't read about the town of Shean, you move through it... and you're moved by it. Calum's old friend Taurus MacLeod, a hard-drinking miner, is also a poet, and his Cumha nam Méinneadairean ("Lament for the Miners") not only honors those killed in the mine but creates a unique bond between Roddie and his grandfather. The nature of Calum's forest will surprise you, and its fate -- well, for that you have to read the book. If you need further encouragement, the Toronto Globe and Mail said (12/24/05) that if there's any justice at all in the world, A Forest for Calum will become a Canadian classic. There's no reason to limit it to Canada.