A Newfoundlander in Canada: Always Going Somewhere, Always Coming Home

Amazon.com Price: $25.00 (as of 10/11/2019 07:44 PST- Details)

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Description

Following the implausible success of his bestselling memoir, Where I Belong, Great Big Sea front man Alan Doyle returns with a hilarious, heartwarming account of leaving Newfoundland and discovering Canada for the first time.

Armed with the same personable, candid style found in his first book, Alan Doyle turns his perspective outward from Petty Harbour toward mainland Canada, reflecting on what it was like to venture away from the comforts of home and the familiarity of the island.
     Steadily in a van, every now and then in a bus, on occasion in a car with broken wipers “the usage of Bob’s belt and a rope found by Paddy’s Pond” to pull them backward and forward, Alan and his bandmates charted new territory, and he constantly measured what he saw of the vast country against what his forefathers once called the Daemon Canada. In a period punctuated by triumphant leaps forward for the band, deflating steps backward and everything in between—opening for Barney the Dinosaur at an outside music festival, being propositioned at a gas station mail-order bride service in Alberta, drinking moonshine with an elderly church-goer on a Sunday morning in PEI—Alan’s few established notions about Canada were Steadily debunked and his own identity as a Newfoundlander was constantly challenged. Touring the country, he also discovered how others view Newfoundlanders and how skewed these images can every now and then be. Asked to play in front of the Queen at a massive Canada Day festival on Parliament Hill, the concert organizers assured Alan and his bandmates that one of the best ways to showcase Newfoundland culture was for them to be towed onto stage in a dory and introduced not as Newfoundlanders but as “Newfies.” The boys were not amused.
     Heartfelt, funny and all the time insightful, these stories tap into the complexities of community and Canadianness, forming the portrait of a young man from a tiny fishing village trying to define and hold on to his sense of home whilst navigating a vast and diverse and wonder-filled country.

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