Louder Than the Sea at Cormorant Books

Louder Than the Sea

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Synopsis

Wayne Bartlett's Louder Than the Sea is an ice-rimed foray into Newfoundland's outports. A harsh, sharp-eyed, occasionally hilarious novel, it shirks much of the mawkish reverence that plagues so much Atlantic fiction in favour of a style packed with luminous detail and the lilt of Newfoundland speech.

Martin Bellman, the youngest son of a family forced to abandon their tiny home port (located on a mere rock known as Sacred Island) and settle in a larger village on Newfoundland proper, is finding it difficult to adjust to his new home. Fourteen years old, he fights with his friends, gets expelled from school, and shows all the signs of turning into a career ne'er-do-well. In the midst of the seal hunt, Martin decides to return to Sacred Island, only to be stranded there to face the elements in arduous isolation.

Reviews

"Bartlett's prose appears to have been learned at the school of Hemingway — his narration is clipped and contrasts wonderfully with the impeccably rendered Newfoundland dialect of his characters. Louder Than the Sea is worth reading for the dialect alone; this is an accent that few novelists have been able to convincingly describe. The novel is bloody in its realism, brilliantly recording the seal hunt in a pair of unforgettable chapters that neither glorify nor condemn their subject. Urban readers may find these sections alienating, but those willing to set aside their idealized conceptions of nature will find Bartlett's novel endlessly rewarding." — Jack Illingworth

"Wayne Bartlett is part of the new wave of writers from Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritimes depicting the vanishing outport world. His is a voice of raw and powerful authenticity." — Annie Proulx