Overview

When disaster strikes a Nova Scotia mine, killing twenty-six men, a town and a family are changed irrevocably. Shifting back and forth in time, Leo McKay Jr.'s unflinching, bestselling work of Atlantic Canadian fiction excavates the rich interior lives of the men and women of the Burrows family: Ziv and Arvel, brothers drawn back to the mine where their ancestors toiled; their father, Ennis, a former union organizer whose body is failing him; Ziv's ex-girlfriend, Meta, who is attempting to start over in Japan; and Arvel's wife, Jackie, who leaves her husband's drinking and volatile temper behind for a better life in Halifax. Set in the aftermath of the explosion and ensuing investigation, Twenty-six is a ""cleanly crafted, richly evocative portrait of a community of families"" (Vancouver Sun), inspired in part by the tragic Westray mining disaster. This critically acclaimed work, now back in print for a new generation, lays bare the complexities of intergenerational trauma, industrial violence, and the universal human struggle.

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9781774715390

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Reviews

""Twenty-Six reads more persuasively than any non-fiction account yet produced of [the Westray mining] disaster.... Readers who pick up [Twenty-Six] will be rewarded with unusually vivid insights into the depth and texture of late-20th century working-class life."" --The National Post ""A cleanly crafted, richly evocative portrait of a community of families.... Leo McKay Jr. has created an entire world so skilfully that it's jarring when the book ends, when one is reminded that these are merely characters, no matter how human they seem."" --The Vancouver Sun ""A compelling account of lives shattered and lives redeemed by disaster.... An unforgettable story of one family's anguish and survival."" --The Halifax Chronicle-Herald ""At its core... an earnest exploration of the painful varieties of human loss."" --Quill & Quire ""Knockout debut novel bound for classic status. Twenty-Six resonates with style, lyricism, and compassion.... An impressive work of fiction that pulsates with imaginative life.... It can be placed alongside Each Man's Son, Mercy Among the Children, Fall on Your Knees and No Great Mischief. It's that good."" --Kitchener Waterloo Record ""Leo McKay Jr. has given us a book compassionate as love, tough as nails. The novel is a magnificent human drama, profound, haunting, and elegiac."" --David Adams Richards ""Swift, honest, unsentimental storytelling and characters, both real and imagined, vivid enough to rise above their hard, often tragic lives. [Twenty-Six] hits you like the kick of a miner's drill."" --Maclean?s --Maclean's ""Universal in its scope, this is a novel about those who live and die in the underground of a coal-mining community. It is also about the families they leave behind on the surface. 'Subterranean' in a variety of ways--some of them quite wondrous--the novel is about memory, loss, guilt, and the light of redemption?sometimes, but not always, before it is too late. Leo Mckay has a clear, distinctive voice which deserves to be heard."" --Alistair MacLeod

Author Information

Leo McKay Jr.'s best known book is the novel Twenty-six, which Canada Reads named one of the forty most important Canadian books of the first decade of the century. It won the Dartmouth Book Award and was chosen for the One Book Nova Scotia event. His debut collection of stories, Like This, also won the Dartmouth Book Award, and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. He lives in Mi'kma'ki, the unceded, ancestral home of the Mi'kmaw people, where he has been a high school teacher for almost thirty years.

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