The Friends of Meager Fortune. This item is unavailable.The Friends of Meager Fortune

With The Friends of Meager Fortune, award-winning author David Adams Richards continues his exploration of New Brunswick's Miramichi Valley, and the universal human matters that concern us all. A story of good and evil, fate and hope, set against the background of a logging town on the brink of change.

Will Jameson has a temperament of iron, standing up to men twice his age when he takes over the Jameson lumber company after his father's death. His younger brother Owen is sensitive, literary and fanciful. But when Will dies suddenly and Owen's beloved Lula rejects him, Owen's deeper character comes to light: joining the army in the hope of getting himself killed, instead Owen returns home a decorated war hero.

Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia--the wife of Will's old friend Reggie Glidden--and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town's gossip and hypocrisy. Inexorably, they are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance and a sensational trial.

At the same time, realizing his destiny, Owen takes over the family business and begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in fierce ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS is one of Canada's pre-eminent writers. His recent novels include Mary Cyr and Principles to Live By, as well as Crimes Against My Brother and Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, both of which were longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Among his other novels, The Lost Highway was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; The Friends of Meagre Fortune won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book; Mercy Among the Children won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Trillium Award. Richards is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi Triology and has written four bestselling books of nonfiction, Lines on the Water, God Is, Facing the Hunter and Hockey Dreams, and most recently the collection of essays Murder. In 2017, David Adams Richards was appointed to the Senate of Canada on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.