The Fetch

Fiction. Drawing on family recollections, interviews with elders and extensive research in archives and regional museums, THE FETCH, Nico Rogers' first book, is a brilliant hybrid neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. This compelling volume of tales and prose poems contains a broad range of characters. There is the slow-witted girl who has lost her mother and now has only the cow named Fatty for a friend; the hard-bitten captain of a schooner in recoil from the ways of his alcoholic father; the child born premature, swaddled in olive oil-soaked linen, placed in a pan and incubated in an oven. And so on, twenty-eight vignettes in all, all tightly written and highly evocative of outport Newfoundland before Confederation. Funny, tragic, and just."