Downhill Chance
by Donna Morrissey
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Description
With Kit's Law, Donna Morrissey established herself as a gifted storyteller. Her chronicle of life in a remote Newfoundland outport was acclaimed by critics and embraced by readers worldwide. Downhill Chance is a captivating successor to Morrissey's first novel. Set in a pair of isolated fishing communities in Newfoundland during and after the Second World War, this is the story of two families joined by friendship but torn apart by fear and sorrows. Prude Osmond reads her tea leaves and show more predicts dark days ahead. Meanwhile, an hour's boat ride away, Job Gale leaves his wife and two young daughters behind to fight in the war, a cause neither they nor their neighbors understand. The war and the dark secrets it holds cascade over the Gale family, afflicting the sensitive yet resourceful Clair, an unforgettable heroine. Forced to restart her life in another place, she must forsake the family she loves and her community. Morrissey blends drama, gritty realism, and a flair for the comic in this unique novel. At its core is the unravelling of secrets - and the redemption that truth ultimately brings. show lessTags
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ThingScore 100
Donna Morrissey’s first novel, Kit’s Law, was enthusiastically acclaimed by readers and garnered a handsome clutch of awards and nominations, making it a daunting act to follow. Downhill Chance is a near match....Morrissey’s prose, threaded with echoes of Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, is a perfect fit for her almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and show more homecomings. For readers unfamiliar with fiction from The Rock, Downhill Chance may read at first like a fantasy, an alternate world with a strange variant language, its characters nursing ancient hurts or bent on redemptive quests. Yet the rural communities Morrissey so vividly depicts are not that far from those found in archetypal small-town Canada show less
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Author Information
10 Works 1,122 Members
Donna Morrissey was born in The Beaches, a small village on the northwest coast of Newfoundland that had neither roads nor electricity until the 1960s - a place not unlike Haire's Hollow, which she depicts in "Kit's Law". When she was sixteen, Morrissey left The Beaches & struck out across Canada, working odd jobs from bartending to cooking in oil show more rig camps to processing fish in fish plants. She went on to earn a degree in social work at Memorial University in St. Johns. It was not until she was in her late thirties that Morrissey began writing short stories, at the urging of a friend, a Jungian analyst, who insisted she was a writer. Eventually she adapted her first two stories into screenplays, which both went on to win the Atlantic Film Festival Award; one aired recently on CBC. "Kit's Law" is Morrissey's first novel, the winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association First-Time Author of the Year Award & shortlisted for many prizes, including the Atlantic Fiction Award & the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Morrissey lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Downhill Chance
- Original publication date
- 2002
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PR9199.3 .M6535 .D69 — Language and Literature English English Literature English literature: Provincial, local, etc.
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 181
- Popularity
- 180,025
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.63)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 10
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 1
