Blood Ties

by David Adams Richards, Merna Summers

For David Adams Richards, blood ties is not merely a figure of speech, but an assertion of the reality of life in small-town Canada, where blood ties people in countless, almost unknowable ways to friends, community, and landscape. The lives of three generations of MacDurmots form a Miramichi Valley family portrait that is beguiling, insightful, witty, and tender. Employing dazzling angles of vision and fast-shifting perspectives, Richards captures the inner lives of his characters with sympathy and understanding.


From the Paperback edition.

Genres: Canada, Fiction, Canadian Literature

400 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

About the author

David Adams Richards (born 17 October 1950) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, screenwriter and poet.

Born in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Richards left St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, one course shy of completing a B.A. Richards has been a writer-in-residence at various universities and colleges across Canada, including the University of New Brunswick.

Richards has received numerous awards including 2 Gemini Awards for scriptwriting for Small Gifts and "For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down", the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Canadian Authors Association Award for his novel Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. Richards is one of only three writers to have won in both the fiction and non-fiction categories of the Governor General's Award. He won the 1988 fiction award for Nights Below Station Street and the 1998 non-fiction award for Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. He was also a co-winner of the 2000 Giller Prize for Mercy Among the Children.

In 1971, he married the former Peggy MacIntyre. They have two sons, John Thomas and Anton Richards, and currently reside in Toronto.

John Thomas was born in 1989 in Saint John, New Brunswick.

The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick administers an annual David Adams Richards Award for Fiction.

Richards' papers are currently housed at the University of New Brunswick.

Reviews

[David]

In her “Afterword,” Merna Summers asserts that we may not like Richards’ characters any more as they develop than we did at their first introduction, but at least we understand better what forces have made them who and what they are as we encounter them in their present. I once wrote that Richards values more than anything else those rare moments of spontaneous human generosity during which people are just nice to each other without selfish motive, no matter how often they might’ve been nasty to each other in the past. When I wrote that, nearly 30 years ago, I was thinking of it as a kind of triumph on the author’s part. My critical thoughts are in flux, all these years down the road. I think Summers is quite right, and that even 30-year-old me might have been not wrong. But I wonder increasingly if understanding people and valuing flitting glimpses of their generosity is quite enough.

[Marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not sure if his past books were like this too but he seems obsessed with nature, birds, water, and the weather which is described very often - he also describes the sky on every couple of pages, sometimes 2 or 3 times on the same page - obsession with purple and yellow too - everything seems to be purple or yellow - and another thing that is annoying me is that he keeps repeating sentences, phrases, and especially dialogue = it seems like everyone in this town says things twice or 3 times in case you didn't catch it the first time - not sure if he is trying to make the dialogue seem more realistic, or if this is a trait of people who live in that area, but it gets to be too much after a while...
This is not the first book of his I've read and don't recall ever being as annoyed with these types of things in the other books I read - maybe it's because this is an earlier work??

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

You might think that at twenty-five, Richards would be too young to write about bravery and love, and all the terror and convention that is set against it. And perhaps you would be right. Except for the fact that experience does not come from the amount of time one lives - it comes from an instinct for life.

[Jilly Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a little hard to get into, and some of the back and forth between characters and timelines was a tad confusing, but it was full of very familiar characters and situations and dialogue. A good read to finish before heading back to New Brunswick.

[Philip Girvan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Canadian Gothic

[Alex Handyside · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was having trouble getting into this book - too many similar characters in the first few chapters, no discernible story was developing, etc.
Then I made the mistake of picking up another book, which had me hooked within five pages.
Bye-bye, Mr Richards. I don't think I'll be back (at least not to this one).

[Ibis3]

NCL.2006-10-01