Every small East Coast town has the same story running underneath it. Someone leaves for work: out west, out to Ontario, out to wherever the economy still has room for them. It is such a common story that it rarely gets written down as a story at all. It is just what happened to a family, or a town, or a whole region.
These four novels write it down anyway. Below them is a newer one: The Push, which looks at leaving from the kitchen table of the person who stayed.
Four Novels About Leaving
No Great Mischief
The Cape Breton novel that this whole conversation runs through. A family of Scottish descent, scattered by generations of men who went west to work the mines, and the pull of blood and place that keeps drawing them back. Spare, patient, and about as close to the source as this list gets.
Away
A multi-generational story that begins with an Irish emigration to Canada and follows the way a single act of leaving echoes down a family line. Urquhart is interested in what gets carried across an ocean, and what gets left behind for good.
A Complicated Kindness
A teenager in a small, closed Mennonite town in Manitoba, counting down the days until she can leave the way her mother and sister already have. Funny and heartbroken in equal measure, and honest about how leaving can look like betrayal to the people who stay.
Crow Lake
Siblings in rural Northern Ontario, orphaned young, who make very different choices about staying close to home or building a life elsewhere. A quiet, exact novel about how those choices get made, and what they cost the people who made them.
Where The Push Fits
Some years after his wife's death, Frank Murray is still in the kitchen in Glace Bay. A young welder he barely knows stops to talk to him one afternoon. He's leaving for Churchill, Manitoba, in the morning, the way so many before him have left for somewhere else.
The conversation wakes something up. Frank starts remembering his own departure from Canso decades ago, the argument he and Silvia had for twenty years about whether their daughters should have stayed too, and whether he was right to tell them to go. Silvia is not there to argue her side of it anymore. So Frank argues it for her, and for the first time, he wonders if she was right.
The Push is a novel about the welders and teachers and nurses pushed out 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. It is Book Two of the Rise Again series, following The Conversation.
