The Push

About the Book

Some years after his wife's death, Frank Murray is still in the kitchen in Glace Bay. The yellow walls. The blue mug on the shelf. A young welder he doesn't really know, stops to talk to him one afternoon, somewhere between his grandson's place and the road. He's leaving for Churchill in the morning.

The conversation wakes something up.

Frank starts to remember things he hasn't thought about in forty years. His own departure from Canso. Three seasons on the draggers. The card-table dinner-party in a Halifax kitchen where he met Silvia. The night they decided to stay in Cape Breton instead of taking the job in Toronto. And the twenty-year argument they had after that — about whether their daughters should have stayed too, or whether he was right to tell them to go. Silvia is not there to argue her side. So Frank argues it for her. And 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 the second volume of the Rise Again series — novels of Cape Breton about staying, leaving, and coming home. More stories from this same kitchen are taking shape.