Teeming with life and remembrance, Wake of the Aspy is a novel of family, passion, and the beauty of memory’s heart. The coastal steamer Aspy connected northern Cape Breton to the world. It was a lifeline, an escape route, and a threat to the old ways. Rooted in a woman’s hard-won independence, Stewart Donovan’s terrific, often hilarious storytelling—the sounds and rhythm and acid wit of daily life—faces with vitality the local life and its encounters with government and a tourism future. Despite expropriations, war, cutbacks and social injustice aimed at driving them out, these are survivors you still might be lucky enough to meet Down North.

Stewart Donovan has taught in the English Department since 1985. He founded the Irish Studies Program and the Film Studies program. In 1994, he founded the Nashwaak Review, a literary, arts, and culture magazine that he continues to edit. He has published several books of poetry and a novel, Maritime Union: A Political Tale (Non-Entity, 1992).

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