Watching the Road

Item Detail

1. Overview
2. Online Book Review

• Overview

  In this impressive collection of fourteen short stories, the poor and blue-collar characters dig only at the surface of their conflicts. That is until they stumble upon a defining moment that heightens their self-awareness, and for better or worse causes them to re-examine who they are. In the end, they can only live with the choices they’ve already made and keep watching the road ahead. They inhabit the tiny outport of Bluff Harbour and the larger, neighbouring town of Millbrook, places that which a world that Stringer himself grew up in. It’s just close enough to St. John’s to catch its ripples of modernization as the last generation of traditional fishermen fade away.

• Online Book Review

  Muscular writing. Fleshy characters. A palpable world. Lee Stringer navigates round the comedy, tragedy and archetypal conflicts tangled up with the absurdity of the human condition. His settings, exquisitely drawn, sharpen the universality of the stories, for the frailties and strengths of his characters in Newfoundland are the frailties and strengths of people anywhere. And Stringer writes cleanly - no intellectual cowardice, no fake cleverness. Stringer's stories come at you full-bore, leaving you, like many of the characters, to ask "Will I stand, or will I fall?"
  

  -Michelle Butler Hallett, author of
  The Shadow Side of Grace and Double-blind
  
  

  Stringer has a keen ear for dialogue and though he flavours his stories with the Newfoundland dialect and idioms, it's never overdone or impenetrable.
  While we may like to think that our lives are very different from these people who struggle with poverty, addiction and cruelty, Stringer manages to make the themes universal. His characters are as human as we are, and as much as it hurts at times to read about them, it is also illuminating.
  

  -Kate Watson, Atlantic Books Today