The sour smell of a long illness and of his mother which he couldn't separate in his head. 'Now the once.' Evered took them, folding the limp fabric against his stomach. 'You'll have need of these,' their father said. Their father tried to hand the clothes to his daughter when he rowed in but Ada held her hands behind her back and shook her head fiercely. And he set to bawling with her then, the two helpless youngsters holding on to one another in the pitch. He was far enough off they couldn't see that their mother was naked when she was tipped into the black of the winter ocean. They watched him wrestling the weight of the corpse with his back to the shore. He was working at something awkward and unpleasant it seemed though neither could guess what it was. They saw him leaning below the gunwales for what seemed a long time, his head and shoulders bobbing up now and then. The two youngsters watched him row away from shore and out beyond the shoal water with his dead wife. With novel The Innocents, Michael Crummey explores strength, spirit and survival in 18th century Newfoundland 'Will I come out with you?' Evered asked. Their father slumped against the gunwale to catch his breath. They set it in the boat along with half a dozen stones scavenged along the shore. He and Evered shifted the covering of reeds and alders away from the overturned boat and hauled it down to the landwash before they carried the corpse from the house. The ground was frozen solid when she died and even if their father had been well enough to shovel there was no digging a grave for her. The woman was deathly sick herself by then, coughing up clots of blood into her hands. Their mother laid the infant in a shallow trough beside the only other grave in the cove and she sang the lullaby she'd sung all her children to sleep with, which was as much as they had to offer of ceremony. They lost their baby sister before the first snowfall. How to tune into the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize.The ceremony will air on CBC, CBC Radio One and will be livestreamed on CBC Books. The Scotiabank Giller Prize gala will be hosted by Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter and star of the television series Jann, Jann Arden. Their loyalty to one another is the reason they are able to persist through storms and illness, but their relationship is tested as they grow older.

In The Innocents, a young brother and sister live in isolation in Newfoundland, surviving alone on the bits of knowledge their parents left behind. The Innocentsby Michael Crummey is a finalist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The innocents crummey