About the Book
Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally 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... But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan O Donnell's lonely boat is eventually crammed with humor, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull. Brian Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea--and a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life's surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
About the Author :
Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author of six collections of essays, two collections of "proems," two nonfiction books, the short story collection Bin Laden's Bald Spot, the novella Cat's Foot, and the novels Mink River, The Plover, and Martin Marten. Doyle's books have seven times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion, the American Scholar, the Sun, the Georgia Review, and in newspapers and magazines around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Age (in Australia). His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the John Burroughs Award for Nature Essays, Foreword Reviewss' Novel of the Year award in 2011, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 (previous recipients include Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, and Mary Oliver). David Drummond has made his living as an actor for over twenty-five years, appearing on stages large and small throughout the country and in Seattle, Washington, his hometown. He has narrated over seventy audiobooks for Tantor, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, from fantasy to military, and from thrillers to humor. He has received multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, including one for his first audiobook, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay. When not narrating, David keeps busy writing plays and stories for children.
Review :
"Brian Doyle writes with Melville's humor, Whitman's ecstasy, and Faulkner's run-on sentences...Few contemporary novels shimmer like this one."
-- "Anthony Doerr, New York Times bestselling author "
"Conrad, Stevenson, and Jack London come to mind, but so does the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez...The Plover sails delightfully on an imaginative sea of insight, compassion, and a kind of mystical grace."
-- "Seattle Times"
"It is Doyle's careful shaping of his characters' internal landscapes that makes The Plover so unique...A novel of wondrous ideas worth mulling over."
-- "Oregonian"
