Bishop's Road

Item Detail

1. Overview
2. Online Book Review

• Overview

  Bishop's Road is set in contemporary St. John's and tells the story of a year in the lives of a handful of odd characters, women mostly, shaken out of their pathetic complacency by a teenage delinquent with magic in her eyes. There are bones in the attic, humour, tragedy, joy, a little romance, murder and some madness and the delicious realization that life is best lived out loud.

  
  

• Online Book Review

  Hope, folly, wisdom, ...the book's point is its picaresque journey, a tumble of overlapping mini-narratives ... Life lessons surface and bob like corks on Safer's bouyant prose.

                                                                                    -The Globe and Mail

  ...a magical and moving story that eludes description ... a novel of complexity and compassion.

                                                                                 -The Chronicle Herald

  Bishop's Road is Catherine Safer's first novel, and it is more than promising.
  She juggles many characters without dropping one, and she knits myriad plots without getting them tangled. Her style is her own, and it is sure, and poetic, with lots of humour and energy and unique phrasings.

  -Joan Sullivan, The Telegram

  There's no doubt, Catherine Safer is a talented writer with a heart full of compassion for the downtrodden. It is refreshing to find someone who not only examines the seamy side of life but longs for a world that is fairer and more equal. A danger with so many characters is that some of them will be stereotyped as good or evil.

  -Helen Fogwill Porter, The Fiddlehead

  ...a magical and moving story that eludes description...The novel heralds the talent of a very original voice...a novel of complexity and compassion."

  -Atlantic Books Today