The Plover - Hardcover

Doyle, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1628991569 ISBN 13: 9781628991567

Publisher: Center Point, 2014

Synopsis

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having finally had enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man . . .

About this title

Review

Praise for The Plover. The Plover is about beauty, loneliness, the mysteries of the sea, albatrosses, an unforgettable young girl, language, healing, and love. And plenty more. Brian Doyle writes with Melville's humor, Whitman's ecstasy, and Faulkner's run-on sentences; in this book he has somehow unified his considerable talents into an affirming, whimsical, exuberant, and pelagic wonder. Few contemporary novels shimmer like this one. --Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector. Brian Doyle has spun a great sea story, filled with apparitions, poetry, thrills, and wisdom. The sweet, buoyant joy under every sentence carried me along and had me cheering. I enjoyed this book enormously. --Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia. Board this boat! Here's Doyle at his probing, astonishing, wordslinging best. --Robin Cody, author of Voyage of a Summer Sun Conrad, Stevenson and Jack London come to mind, but so does the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. ... The Plover sails delightfully on an imaginative sea of insight, compassion and a kind of mystical grace. --The Seattle Times It is Doyle's careful shaping of his characters' internal landscapes that make The Plover so unique. ... A novel of wondrous ideas worth mulling over. ... What The Plover has on offer is aplenty: big themes -- the search inner peace, a need to be loved, the destruction of our planet -- flanked by small touches, like the reproductions of ocean-themed woodcuts at the opening of each chapter or the bars of music sprinkled throughout the text (if you have an instrument on hand, give those notes a gander). The Oregonian The Plover alternately reminded me of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey, with its crippled main character and fictional country; The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, for strange adventures at sea; Florence and Giles by John Harding, for made-up words; and the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez --Various

About the Author

Brian Doyle edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. He is the award-winning author of many books, among them the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River.
David Drummond has been narrating audiobooks for a few years now and hopes one of these days to get it right. He much prefers dead authors and live audiences.

Edition details

• Publisher: Center Point
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1628991569
• ISBN 13: 9781628991567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 367