What does it cost to leave — and what does it cost to have told others to?
Some years after his wife’s death, Frank Murray is still in the house in Glace Bay. A young welder stops to talk to him one afternoon. He’s leaving for Churchill.
The conversation wakes something up. Frank remembers his own departure from Canso forty years earlier, his three seasons on the draggers, his move to Halifax, the card-table dinner-party where he met Silvia. He remembers the twenty-year argument with his wife about whether their daughters should have stayed. Silvia is not there to argue her side, so Frank argues it for her. For the first time he wonders if she was right.
A novel about the people who go — the welders and teachers and nurses and engineers pushed west and south by economies that could not hold them — and about the quieter cost of being the one who told them it was the right thing to do.
The Push is Book Two of the Rise Again Trilogy. It follows The Conversation and precedes The Pull. Each novel stands alone; together they trace one family across a generation of staying, leaving, and coming home.
The Push is currently in development.
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Home is not a place you live. It’s a place you keep answering to.
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