WE CAME FROM AWAY

A love letter to the island of Newfoundland

On the island of Newfoundland at the edge of North America, if you’re not an islander, you’re a “come-from-away.” And if you were born here and left never to return, according to Nora Houlihan, who is about to turn one hundred, you’re the worst kind of CFA. But she’s about to have a birthday party and demands that her family return. Before the party, though, she wants them to see what they’re missing by living in appalling places like Toronto and New York. So she arranges a cross-island tour for them.

Under the careful eye of tour guide old Gordie O’Brien, Nora’s two children, both in their seventies themselves, and their assorted middle-aged children are packed into a truck for a week to put aside their petty family squabbles and their prissy food fetishes, their designer handbags and their champagne tastes to experience the things that really matter.

By the time they reach St. John’s to celebrate one hundred years of the tactless, obnoxious Nora’s life, they have all changed—just not in the way she might have anticipated.

But every family has its secrets—and Nora’s family has more than its share of skeletons deeply buried in the closet. And it’s time to let them see the light of day. They may scandalize her offspring, but nothing will captivate their imaginations more than the mystery and emotional charge of the place where they were knit.

A love letter to the island of Newfoundland, this enchanting and funny story could only have been written by a “come-from-away.”

From the author…

“This book was nothing short of a labour of love. For almost four decades, I’ve been married to a Newfoundlander who left the island when he was seventeen years old to go to university, returning over the years to visit his parents, but last year, something magical happened.

My husband and I took a ten-day trip back to Newfoundland to do a cross-island tour, something he had never experienced. Being a city boy from St. John’s on the east coast of the island, he had never travelled the Viking Trail or hiked in Gros Morne National Park on the Great Northern Peninsula. So we landed in Deer Lake and met our guide with a fancy SUV, just as Erica, Eliza and the rest of the characters populating this book did.

That trip and my own mother’s one-hundredth birthday inspired this story.“