The Innocents

**From prizewinning author Michael Crummey comes a spellbinding story of survival in which a brother and sister confront the limits of human endurance and their own capacity for loyalty and forgiveness.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 GILLER PRIZE, GOVERNOR GENERALS PRIZE AND WRITERS TRUST FICTION AWARD

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The Innocents is richly imagined and compulsively readable. A riveting story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister. Electrifying and heartbreaking, it is a testament to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of our individual selves.

In centuries past, a brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundlands coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. With only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the familys boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to help them survive.

Enduring the severe round of the seasons, years of meagre catches, storms and ravaging illness, only their fierce loyalty to each other motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.