Down the Coaltown Road
- Publisher
- Pottersfield Press
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2014
- Category
- Historical
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781552634820
- Publish Date
- Sep 2002
- List Price
- $24.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781897426555
- Publish Date
- Mar 2014
- List Price
- $22.95
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Description
In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.
About the author
Born in Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, Sheldon Currie is professor emeritus at St. Francis Xavier University and author of short stories, novels, and plays. Probably his most widely known work is The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, which was also adapted for radio and stage plays, and made into the critically acclaimed film Margaret’s Museum, starring Helena Bonham Carter. In his varied career, Sheldon has also served in the RAF and as fiction editor of The Antigonish Review. His play Lauchie, Liza and Rory won the 2004 Merritt Award for best play by a Nova Scotia writer. Down the Coaltown Road, first published in 2002, was nominated for the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
