Excerpt from Sweetland by Michael Crummey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You're making that up, Sweetland had said.

Am not.

There's no such word as hellish pad.

Helipad, Jesse had repeated. Nothing insulted the youngster more than inaccuracy or invention. With the one notable exception, he was literal to a fault. He spelled helipad for Sweetland, to underline the word's veracity. He'd always been a champion speller. Near-photographic memory, according to the Reverend. A generation ago, the Reverend said, they'd have called the boy an idiot savant.

I'd say that's about half right, Sweetland said.

Sweetland still called it the hellish pad, over the boy's objections. He never missed a chance to lampoon Jesse's childish seriousness. He had hoped to goad the youngster off the beaten track of his thoughts, to make him look at the world from a slightly crooked angle, though it made no appreciable difference and he kept at it now mostly out of habit. For his part, Jesse seemed to accept Sweetland's mockery as a fact of life, granting him special dispensation to behave like a fool, a kind of court jester in the youngster's kingdom of the exact.

Beyond the pad was a decommissioned winchhouse, and leading down from the winch to the water was a higgledy series of ladders screwed into the cliffs, two hundred feet in length, angled awkwardly to follow the contours of the rock face. The Fever Rocks were the access point for the lightkeeper long before choppers were an option, supplies and materials hauled up by winch from boats below. The ladders were still maintained for emergency access to the light when the weather was too foggy for a helicopter to fly. They looked like something designed and built by Dr. Seuss. Generations of island youngsters had rowed out here to climb it on a dare. Sweetland had managed it once, he and Duke and Pilgrim drunk and in the dark. The sight of it still made him feel slightly nauseous, almost sixty years on.

The path led into a section of scrub forest and passed above a ravine scored into the island's back, and from there on to its southern tip. It was how the keeper used to travel to the south-end light above the Mackerel Cliffs, a five-hour trip by horse and cart back in the day. Sweetland managed it in just over an hour on the quad. The path was rarely used anymore and was nearly overgrown, the spruce crowding in. They had to walk single file, Jesse out in front, the wet branches soaking their sleeves as they went.

Clara had gotten the boy a haircut while they were in St. John's, cropped close at the nape and sides. Sweetland could see the seashell whorls of the double crown at the back of Jesse's head. A lick of hair sticking up between them, a rogue pook that had gone its own way since he'd had enough hair to comb. Before Jesse learned to walk, Sweetland used to twirl it around his finger to make it stand straight, like a headdress feather in the cowboy movies he'd watched with Duke in the old Toronto theatres. Mommy's little Indian, he called him.

The youngster couldn't stand anyone touching his head now and Sweetland thought he might be to blame for that. He could just resist the urge to reach out and smooth the lick down.

The slips were tailed at the base of spruce trees where the runs crossed the trail. They were tied to an alder standard he'd pushed firm into the ground, the silver noose snugged around with brush. A rabbit lying in the first snare and Sweetland knelt to help Jesse work the wire free of the neck, tying a length of string around the paws so the boy could carry the animal across his shoulder.

They walked nearly two hours before they stopped for lunch, settling in a clearing beyond the valley. The peak of the Priddles' cabin half-hidden among the spruce and birch below. The racket of gannets nesting on the Music House headlands drifting up to them where they sat. They had two brace for their efforts and Sweetland laid the rabbits in the grass at their feet, the animals fat and sleek and bug-eyed. He dug out the sandwiches and they ate in silence a few minutes. When Jesse finished his lunch he sang for a while, belting out the details of some bygone disaster, though it wasn't a performance. The audience was irrelevant, Sweetland knew. The song part of a private landscape that surfaced now and then into the wider world.

Excerpted from Sweetland: A Novel by Michael Crummey. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Crummey Ink, Inc. First American Edition 2015. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.