Spit Delaney's Island by Jack Hodgins
 Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award
Spit Delaney's Island is Vancouver Island, and its settings,  the lush green forests, the pulp mills, the all-encompassing sea, and the ferries crossing to the mainland permeate this stunning collection of short fiction.
Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career. Often compared to Faulkner's fiction of the deep South, Hodgins' stories develop through people who seem to live at the edge of the world, always in danger of falling off that edge. There is Spit himself, the keeper of a steam locomotive that has been exiled to Ottawa for display; there are loggers, country wives, bookstore owners, and people who live up the mountain in isolated communes. Hodgins' prose brings Vancouver Island to life in its touch, its taste and the sound of its dialects -- a determinedly real world. But at the same time he imbues his people with a sense that there is something more that they cannot see, but which they sense and strive towards -- a mystery or even magic that they can almost touch but which remains forever elusive.
Every so often a new writer appears who sets the literary world talking. Here's what they are saying about Jack Hodgins. Alice Munro: "Jack Hodgin's stories do one of the best things fiction can do -- they reveal the Extra Dimension of the Real Place, they light up the crazy necessities of Real Life." When you read this book you will understand the excitement
Jack Hodgins was raised in Merville, on Vancouver Island

    Softcover: 199 pages
    Item Weight : 499 g
    Publisher : MacMillan 1977
    Language: : English

Out of print