The Island Walkers
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A powerful first novel about a family that slips from fortune's favor and a town broken by the forces of modernity
Across a bend of Ontario's Attawan River lies the Island, a working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers.
The family's troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town and Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends at the mill and advancement up the company ranks. Alf's worries are aggravated by his wife, Margaret, who has never reconciled her middle-class English upbringing to her blue-collar reality. As the summer passes, Joe, their son, is also forced to reckon with his family's standing when he falls headlong for a beautiful newcomer on a bridge—a girl far beyond him, with greater experience and broader horizons. As the threat of mill closures looms, the Walkers grapple with their personal crises, just as the rest of the town fights to protect its way of life amid the risks of unionization and the harsh demands of corporate power.
Superbly crafted and deeply moving, this remarkable debut follows the Walkers to the very bottom of their night only to confirm, in the end, life's ultimate hopefulness. The Island Walkers is at once a love letter to a place, a gripping family saga, and a testimony to the emergence of an important new novelist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a Canadian mill town in the mid-1960s, this solemn, accomplished first novel charts the fate of mill worker Alf Walker and his family as the town teeters on the brink of great upheaval. In 1965, Bannerman's mills, the largest employer in Attawan, Ontario, are taken over by Intertex, a textile conglomerate with an eye for cost cutting. After the first round of layoffs, a union organizer comes to Attawan, attracting suspicion from both management and workers, many of whom remember the disastrous results of an ill-planned strike in 1949. Alf, reluctant to jeopardize his standing as heir apparent to the foreman's job, is particularly skeptical of the drive to unionize. However, when Alf's desire to please the new management leads to unintended consequences, he begins to reconsider his position. Meanwhile, Alf's son Joe, a studious teenager who plans to go to college, falls for Anna Macrimmon, a worldly new classmate whose father is an accountant at Intertex. At the other end of the social spectrum, Joe's younger brother, Jamie, befriends Billy Boileau, son of a poor half-Indian mother, prompting Jamie's mother, Margaret, to label the Boileaus "not our kind of people," and going so far as to ban the child from her home. Bemrose's rather studied, deliberate prose and self-conscious lyricism slow the pace at first, but as the novel gains momentum, its exploration of class and vivid sense of place give it weight and depth.
