Kindle Deal of the Day: River of the Brokenhearted is $1.99 Today Only

From the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Mercy Among the Children comes the utterly beguiling, big-hearted story of one woman’s resolute struggle to overcome small-town prejudice and deceit. Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life and legacy of Janie McCleary, a brave Irish Catholic girl who dared to marry a man from the Church of England. Their union is quickly deemed scandalous, and when her husband dies just before the Great Depression, everyone in town, led by the unscrupulous Joey Elias, turns against her. Janie is left alone to raise a family.

 

Her solution is to open one of the first movie theaters in North America, which she runs with such success that she manages to ostracize herself even further. She is a pioneer before the age of feminism, and the burden of her salty individualism will shape the lives of her children and grandchildren. Written with compassion and mastery, River of the Brokenhearted muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of extraordinary characters, where Richards finds an alchemy of venality and goodwill, deceit and brotherliness, and marked cruelty and true love. Once again, David Adams Richards has brought us a work of astonishing grace, rooted in his special territory on the great river of New Brunswick, but firmly universal in scope.

Set in a small town on a river in New Brunswick, River of the Brokenhearted, David Adams Richards’s first novel since his Giller Prize-winning Mercy Among the Children, is told by Wendell King, son of Miles King and grandson of the feisty, willful Janie McLeary King, who made her fortune running the town’s first cinema. Set against this trio is the lower-class family of the Drukens, especially Rebecca Druken and her uncle, Joey Elias, bitter because their own early cinema failed. Established early on, the feud plays out across three generations, spanning successes, failures, murder, and dissolution. Yet despite the somewhat bleak subject matter, tremendous humour and vitality persist in this story. The characters leap off the page, and in the person of Miles King, Richards has imagined a fully human soul of stunning believability. Miles is fatally flawed, committing slow suicide by gin as his cinema too begins to fail in the face of the TV’s small screen. A sensitive eccentric, a target of small-town narrowness, he is subtly tortured psychically, for years, by Elias and the vicious Rebecca, who have made the downfall of the Kings their life’s ambition. Miles King is a character of great loneliness, pathos, humor, and compassion, one of the finest creations not only of Canadian writing but any literature.

 

River of the Brokenhearted is the story of a river, the Miramichi, but it is mostly about the river of time that passes through Miles King, his mother, his son, and their enemies, carrying all to their ultimate fates: “She had left a river in New Brunswick that would swallow you with its life, shout in its rapids, laugh in its eddies, create industry in its currents, a river of Irish and Scottish myth, wedded to the soil.” An outstanding work of fiction. –Mark Frutkin