From the Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishop’s Man comes a bestselling classic childhood memoir, full of humour and heartache, set in Cape Breton Island
Linden MacIntyre remembers vividly the day construction started on the causeway. September 15, 1952, was the day that Change—always for the better and always from away—arrived to link his small Cape Breton village with the wide world of the mainland. With its grand promises of jobs and riches and progress, the building of the Canso Causeway also became a potent personal icon for MacIntyre, the road that would bring him closer to the father who was always away.
In a highly evocative memoir—at once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a luminous reflection on fathers and sons—MacIntyre fills his pages with vivid characters. From his grandmother, the Gaelic-speaking Peigeag, who, it was rumoured, had “special powers” that could both cure and curse, to Dan Rory, the father MacIntyre struggles to know and love, these are people who inhabit a time and a place that is on the brink of transformation. No one knows this more than MacIntyre, his narrative voice ringing true on every page, the voice of a young boy both mystified and captivated by the worlds he straddles.
Shot through with humour and humanity, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that sets a new standard for the genre.

Causeway

Biographies & Memoirs

MacIntyre, Linden

Historical

HarperCollins, Publishers

From the Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishop's Man comes a stunning Cape Breton coming-of-age story, enchanting, hilarious, and heartbreaking
Winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award
National bestseller and a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and Finalist for the OLA Evergreen Award
Causeway is Linden MacIntyre’s evocative memoir of his Cape Breton childhood. At once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a reflection on fathers and sons, the narrative revolves around the construction of the Canso Causeway that would link the small Cape Breton village of MacIntyre’s childhood to the wide world of the mainland. Shot through with humour, humanity and vivid characters, Causeway is an extraordinary book, a memoir that has set a new standard for the genre.

Harper-perennial

From the Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishop’s Man comes a mesmerizing novel in the tradition of Alistair MacLeod, David Adams Richards and Ann-Marie MacDonald.
In one apocalyptic night, John Gillis and his estranged cousin, Sextus, confront a half century of half-truths and suppositions that have shaped and scarred their lives, their families and their insular Cape Breton community. Telling stories that unravel a host of secrets, they begin to realize that they were damaged before they were born, their fathers and a close friend forming an unholy trilogy in a tragic moment of war. Among the roots of a complex andpainful relationship, they uncover the truth of a fateful day John has spent 20 years trying to forget.
Taut and brilliantly paced, The Long Stretch is etched with quiet humour and crafted with fiery dialogue.

Long Stretch

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Effie Gillis is a history professor teaching at a major university. She is also a survivor - of a troubled childhood, two failed marriages and numerous relationships which, for the most part, ended badly. Now, out of her past, arrives a man who is familiar and yet mysterious; mature, wise, and full of youthful energy. His presence is a reassurance, but he also carries with him an aura that is menacing. Slowly she becomes dependent on a relationship that's rich in truth and promise - but doomed by the lie that gave it life. Drawing on both minor and major characters from his two previous novels, The Long Stretch and The Bishop's Man , Why Men Lie is a story of longing, love and loss in middle age.

Why Men Lie

Literary

Naxos Audio Music

Who Killed Ty Conn is the brilliant investigative work of Linden MacIntyre and Theresa Burke, the current host and producer respectively of the CBC's the fifth estate. It tells the tragic story of Ty Conn's life of crime and misfortune. Originally published by Viking Canada in 2000, the book has been updated and reissued with a new afterword from the author and a new foreword by author and criminologist Elliott Leyton.  A classic in the literature of true crime, Who Killed Ty Conn portrays a man coming to terms with a life of rejection - and the social system that failed to save him.

Who Killed Ty Conn?

Burke, Theresa

Penguin Books Canada, Limited

Father Duncan MacAskill has spent most of his priesthood as the Exorcist”an enforcer employed by his bishop to discipline wayward priests and suppress potential scandal. He knows all of the devious ways that lonely priests persuade themselves that their needs trump their vows, but he’s about to be sorely tested himself.While sequestered by his bishop in a small rural parish to avoid an impending public controversy, Duncan must confront the consequences of past cover-ups and the suppression of his own human needs. Pushed to the breaking point by loneliness, tragedy, and sudden self-knowledge, Duncan discovers how hidden obsessions and guilty secrets either find their way to the light of understanding or poison any chance we have for love and spiritual peace.

The Bishop's Man

JONATHAN CAPE.

Something about the boat, perhaps its name, and the posture of that boy caused me to defer my anxieties for the moment. It was so rare to see someone that age stationary, somber. I was more accustomed to a rowdy adolescent enthusiasm. This young man, I realized, was exceptional only because of time and place. Maybe any one of them in those circumstances would have been the same. Quiet. But he caught my attention nevertheless and linked the moment to tender places in the memory. Doomed boys and men: in retrospect they all have that stillness. --from The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre The year is 1993 and Father Duncan MacAskill stands at a small Cape Breton fishing harbour a few miles from where he grew up. Enjoying the timeless sight of a father and son piloting a boat, Duncan takes a moment’s rest from his worries. But he does not yet know that his already strained faith is about to be tested by his interactions with a troubled boy, 18-year-old Danny MacKay. Known to fellow priests as the “Exorcist” because of his special role as clean-up man for the Bishop of Antigonish, Duncan has a talent for coolly reassigning deviant priests while ensuring minimal fuss from victims and their families. It has been a lonely vocation, but Duncan is generally satisfied that his work is a necessary defense of the church. All this changes when lawyers and a policeman snoop too close for the bishop’s comfort. Duncan is assigned a parish in the remote Cape Breton community of Creignish and told to wait it out. This is not the first time Duncan has been sent away for knowing too much: decades ago, the displeased bishop sent a more idealistic Duncan to Honduras for voicing suspicions about a revered priest. It was there that Duncan first tasted forbidden love, with the beautiful Jacinta. It was also there that he met the courageous Father Alfonso, who taught him more about spiritual devotion than he had ever known back home. But when an act of violence in Honduras shook Duncan to his core, he returned home a changed man, willing to quietly execute the bishop’s commands. Now, decades later in Cape Breton, Duncan claims to his concerned sister Effie that isolation is his preference. But when several women seek to befriend him, along with some long-estranged friends, Duncan is alternately tempted and unnerved by their attentions. Drink becomes his only solace. Attempting to distract himself with parish work, Duncan takes an interest in troubled young Danny, whose good-hearted father sells Duncan a boat he names The Jacinta. To Duncan’s alarm, he discovers that the boy once spent time with an errant priest who had been dispatched by Duncan himself to Port Hood. Duncan begins to ask questions, dreading the answers. When tragedy strikes, he knows that he must act. But will his actions be those of a good priest, or an all too flawed man? Winner of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Linden MacIntyre’s searing The Bishop’s Man is an unforgettable and complex character study of a deeply conflicted man at the precipice of his life. Can we ever be certain of an individual’s guilt or innocence? Is violence ever justified? Can any act of contrition redeem our own complicity?

Random House Canada

Vintage Canada

This latest novel from Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Linden MacIntyre, Why Men Lie, offers a moving and emotionally complex conclusion to the Cape Breton trilogy. Two years after the events of The Bishop’s Man, we’re introduced to Effie MacAskill Gillis, sister of the troubled priest Duncan. It’s 1997, and Effie is an independent, middle-aged woman working as a tenured professor of Celtic Studies, but her complicated and often disappointing love life has left her all but ready to give up on the opposite sex. Then suddenly, a chance encounter with a man on a Toronto subway platform gives Effie renewed hope. J.C. Campbell is an old friend she hasn’t seen for more than 20 years – an attractive, single man who appears to possess the stability and good sense she longs for. Effie met her last husband, Sextus, in her hometown of Cape Breton when the two were still children. As they grew older together, and started a family, she soon learned that when it came to other women, Sextus couldn’t be trusted. After one too many betrayals, Effie leaves him behind, and so when she and J.C. seem to hit it off, his relaxed, open demeanour is a welcome change. But after a happy start to their relationship, cracks begin to show, and J.C. proves himself to be just as unpredictable as the others: one evening Effie spots him in a seedy part of town, but he denies ever having left his house; when she notices a scratch below his eye, he lies about its cause, blaming it on the cat. Then J.C., a journalist, becomes unhealthily engrossed in a story involving a convict on death row, and he and Effie begin to drift apart. Although he still checks in sporadically and insists there’s nothing going on, she soon learns he has a deeply personal reason for his covert trips to that seedy downtown street. In fact, it turns out there’s a lot about his past that Effie doesn’t know, and a lot he’s still learning himself. While J.C. is busy chasing his own past, Effie is rarely able to escape her own. Family ties and hometown connections to Cape Breton mean her two ex-husbands – Sextus happens to be the cousin of her first husband, John – are constantly coming and going in a turbulent mess of comfort and commotion, while her grown daughter, Cassie, brings some unexpected news of her own. After all of her experience in relationships with men, Effie thought she knew all she needed to about what to expect, and how to maintain her self-sufficiency. Why do men lie?, she wants to know. But whether it’s for love, for protection, or for more selfish reasons, Effie soon learns that no amount of experience can prepare you for what might resurface from the past, and for the damage that might cause, emotionally or otherwise.

Why Men Lie is about Effie, the fascinating sister of the troubled priest at the heart of The Bishop's Man. Effie has had her fair share of lovers and husbands, including the Gillis cousins from Cape Breton, who have been a source of as much guilt as joy. She first married John, then ran away to Toronto with the charismatic Sextus, who is still in her life despite her having divorced him years ago. But she's more or less given up on being swept away by love, until, in a chance encounter, she meets a person who might very well be the perfect man. And love once again rears its thorny head, with all its troublesome illusions, at an age when maintaining illusions is hard. Even Effie, as wise as any woman can be to the ways of men, is unprepared for the maelstrom her new love affair will unleash. Or for the particularly male desperation and vanity that is its cause.

Dramas & Plays

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Books by MacIntyre, Linden

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacIntyre, Linden. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Causeway

Causeway

Long Stretch

Why Men Lie

Who Killed Ty Conn?

The Bishop's Man

The Bishop's Man

The Bishop's Man

Why Men Lie

Why Men Lie