“This multi-faceted jewel of a book is probably the finest Canadian novel of the year. River Thieves marks the emergence of a powerful, mature talent.” -Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall Crummey has the rare ability to breathe his characters right off the page and into the reader’s mind, where they then lodge, living on well past the final page. The writing is simple and beautiful, fully textured and gracefully rendered. “Michael Crummey’s River Thieves is a novel of exquisite craftsmanship and masterful artistry that should gain the broad attention it so richly deserves: a novel of intricately balanced storytelling and intriguing location but one also where the keen eye of a poet resides within the language. Anyone who wants this kind of story to come equipped with heroes and, perhaps, even answers, should turn to Rudy Wiebe, but Crummey's labyrinthine approach has its own distinct appeal.
The book's real heart-the Beothuks-never becomes fully articulate the Beothuks remain buried on the shore, or encamped among the snows of Red Indian Lake. Rather than offering a grisly, guilt-ridden adventure story that rushes from its suitably portentous beginning to its inevitably sombre end, Crummey works with a meandering sort of history, one that has to go over the same events a few times before they begin to give up their secrets, temporarily leaving his readers as disoriented as his benighted characters. River Thieves is an oddly meandering novel, and this is its greatest appeal. Through the lives and reminiscences of some of the colony's most prominent European residents-David Buchan, a naval explorer and idealist who attempts to bring the isolated Beothuks into productive contact with the British Empire John Peyton Jr., the obedient son of a relentlessly patriarchal local trader Cassie Jure, John Peyton Sr.'s literate, aloof housekeeper and Joseph Reilly, a transported Irish thief and a genuinely decent trapper-Crummey recounts a halfhearted attempt, foiled by the colony's petty tensions, to save the Beothuks. 2002 /Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: In River Thieves, his first novel, poet and short-story writer Michael Crummey reaches far into Newfoundland's past to tell one of the colony's most tragic stories: the extermination of the Beothuk people.
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