Cape Breton Road: A Novel [Hardcover]

D. R. MacDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2001

This is the story of Innis Corbett, a young man born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, into a Highlander community whose inhabitants are held by ties of memory and blood. As a child Innis went with his parents to live in Boston. After his father was killed in a car accident, Innis was raised by his mother, a woman with a weakness for men and drink. When Innis gets into trouble over a series of car thefts, he is deported back to Canada, a fate worse than prison, in his eyes. Innis ends up living with his Uncle Starr amidst the harshly beautiful landscape that has shaped his family and that both absorbs and challenges him. He takes refuge in the wild, dense woods, where he devises a plan to grow marijuana. This venture relieves his loneliness and gives him something to care for, a secret of his own. Then Claire, an attractive former flight attendant nearing 40, enters the Starr household. So begins an entanglement that leads to suspicion, jealousy, and ultimately to violence. Cape Breton Road is an exceptional novel by a writer with an unerring eye for landscape and tragedy that is bred in the bone.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At the beginning of Cape Breton Road, D.R. MacDonald's 19-year-old protagonist finds himself deported from Boston, where he's stolen one too many cars. Innis is sent back to his native Nova Scotia--or more precisely, to remote Cape Breton Island. There he is exiled to the old family farmhouse to live with his reluctant uncle, whose penchant for booze and girls leaves little time for supervising an errant nephew. Not surprisingly, Innis at once looks for an escape. From time to time he hikes up into the hills, where he can plant his attic-nurtured marijuana seedlings far from prying eyes. Up in the woods he sets to work "with a pleasure no other task had matched, spacing the pots zigzag so they would look natural, like weeds, if someone did happen by, seduced, like him, by the light of a clearing."

The ice slowly melts, the sun bakes the earth, and Innis's seedlings flourish. He's also drawn into the community of old, Gaelic-speaking families, whose language and way of life may be melting with the snow, but whose sense of place gives them an inner knowledge no outsider could learn. Yet the forces of love and trust--as personified by his uncle's pretty, frivolous mistress, Claire--ultimately deal out devastation to the hero and those around him. Cape Breton Road has more than its share of suspense and erotic electricity. At the same time, however, it's an elegy to a fading way of life, and a portrait of landscape where nature is so fiercely uncompromising that it takes on a spectral, sinister force of its own. --Carey Green

From Publishers Weekly

Thirteen years after the publication of his 1988 Pushcart Prize-winning short story collection, Eyestone, MacDonald's fiction is still shaped by the rugged landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In his debut novel, the drama again unfolds against the unforgiving geography of Canada's East Coast. When his penchant for stealing cars catches up with him in Boston, 20-year-old Canadian Innis Corbett is duly shipped back to Nova Scotia to live with his surly Uncle Starr. His uncle's remote Cape Breton farm is perched on the edge of a small community where everybody knows everyone else's business. Innis, determined to escape, devises a plan to cultivate pot in the attic to fund his next move. Into this unstable household drops Claire, a 40-ish former stewardess fleeing an abusive relationship. As Innis and Claire grow close, Starr's jealousy and suspicions bring tensions between the two men to the boiling point. The story takes several dramatic turns, but more compelling than the plot are the Cape Bretons whom Innis comes to know, a people long on memory and more than a little fey. MacDonald captures their dialect, strength and spirit with powerful clarity. The long gap between the publication of Eyestone and this novel means MacDonald will have to be introduced all over again to most readers, but the novel's terse prose, rich character development and strong themes make it a natural for handselling. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (January 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005230
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005239
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,471,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read: Cape Breton Road, March 27, 2003

By 

Jim "Sketcher" Loucks "Jim Fred" (Zanesville, OH United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Cape Breton Road (Paperback)

Other reviewers have given plot details and discussed their reactions to the novel's ending, so I'll just cut to the chase: Cape Breton Road is amazingly well-written -- without the prolixity and gratuitous detail of so many contemporary novelists. Its prose is lean and spare, and therefore intense. Every detail strikes the reader as authentic; every experience woven into the plot has been "earned" or "lived" -- come by honestly and set down with something akin to reverence. Its presentation of nature and its impact on the observer are fine and true, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence at his best, as in Sons and Lovers. Cape Breton Road is destined to become a word-of-mouth classic.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tragedy worth reading, July 18, 2001

By 

Judith Haxton "salty" (Laurel, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cape Breton Road: A Novel (Hardcover)

This was a well-written tragedy. I compare it to a Shakespeare tragedy. I didn't like the ending but it wasn't that I didn't like what the author wrote. I kept hoping Innis would make better choices. It was that hope that kept me reading to the end. And, of course, the author's wonderful descriptions of Nova Scotia's people, woods, water, events also kept me reading with great enjoyment. So even though I didn't like the ending, I loved the book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Please dont' play it again, Donald..., July 9, 2005

By 

Ruth Cleveland (Studio City, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cape Breton Road: A Novel (Hardcover)

Cape Breton Road is a book that could have been a masterpiece of literature. Instead, it turned into a mind-numbing repetitive description of woods and water. Count, if you can, how many times he uses the same descriptive words for trees and cold. The book comes more alive in the description of Innis' painful feelings of love for the unattainable Claire. As for the ending, it reminds me of the gimmick sometimes used by film makers. You supply the ending. Worse, the author didn't know how to end his book.