The Wanton Troopers

by Alden Nowlan, David Richards (Afterword)

Overview

In this new edition of Alden Nowlan's poignant first novel, published posthumously in 1988, a boy growing up in a small Nova Scotia mill town is abandoned by the young mother he adores. Family relationships, sexual confusions, and the pains of love are rendered with deep and authentic feeling. This is an essential book for all readers who have admired the work of this major Canadian writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780864925466
Publisher:	Goose Lane Editions
Publication date:	11/27/2009
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born in Hants Co., Nova Scotia, in 1933, Alden Nowlan moved to Hartland, New Brunswick, when he was nineteen, and worked on the Hartland Observer as reporter, editor, and general facilitator until he went to Saint John (and the Telegraph Journal) in 1963. In 1968 he was invited to take up the position of Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Alden Nowlan died on June 27th, 1983.

David Adams Richards is a resident of Fredericton and is one of only three Canadian writers who have won Governor General's Awards for Fiction and Non-Fiction. His novel Mercy Among the Children won the 2000 Giller Prize, while his most recent novel, Incidents in the Life of Marcus Paul, won the 2012 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Wanton Troopers is a remarkable book which will remain in the reader's memory long after it is read. The characters of the mother and father are brilliantly drawn and cause a deep sympathy, as lasting as any." — David Adams Richards

"Set in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, the boy's thwarted idealism creates Bronte-like heroic worlds where the good Kevin O'Brien conquers evil. An engaging story — in several ways better than the ones Nowlan later pubished if only because the man who wrote it was so close in time to the boy he was." — Kathleen Tudor

"Alden Nowlan's first novel describes a world of brute poverty in which even the birds are ‘the colour of frozen mud and dead grass, sluggish with cold.' The Wanton Troopers is essential reading for anyone interested in the sources of Nowlan's imaginative world, and for those intrigued by the emergence of a strong and significant poetic voice from conditions of powerlessness, confusion and terror." — Janice Kulyk Keefer

"The brilliantly imagined story of a beautiful child and his parents locked in brutal, alcoholic poverty. Nevertheless, in a world where relentless pride can only express itself as rage, shame or vicious cruelty. Kevin O'Brien's spiritual longings remain unquenchable. Somehow, desperately, he continues to dream of beauty and of gentle goodness." — Rudy Wiebe

"A book that exposes to forgive, forgives in order to celebrate — and in the end, begs us all to love." — David Adams Richards