North of Smokey

David Doucette

Out of print. Available only from the author.

Award-winning author David Doucette begins his latest novel in the hardscrabble life of an isolated coastal community of Depression-era Cape Breton. Doucette is a gifted storyteller whose characters and landscapes are at once beautiful and bestial, sustaining and sinister. North of Smokey raises the bar for Cape Breton literature.

This is the gripping story of Frank Curtis, the youngest of four children in a family whose small cold, wood frame house is typical of settlements that once occupied remote Cape Breton coastlines between ocean and mountain – and typical of families scratching a living from both. As the youngest,
Frank has to try the hardest, learn the fastest, be the more determined. A near-fatal hunting accident in adolescence exposes Frank’s inner and outer strengths; fortitude and fate propel him out of the shadows of his rural home to the spotlight of the world stage … and back.