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

Sweetland rooted in the bag after a tin of peaches, which was the only fruit the boy would eat. Only from a can, only Del Monte. Sweetland had a cupboardful at the house. He opened the top, passing it across when the song was done.

"Pop says it's just you and Loveless wants to stay now," Jesse said. Sweetland stared across at the boy, who was focused on the tin, shovelling the fruit into his mouth with a plastic spoon. He hadn't once mentioned that whole business before now. From what Sweetland could tell, the issue of resettlement had never registered in the peculiar peaks and valleys of the youngster's mind, though it had been the main topic of conversation in the cove for years now. "Will I have to go?" Jesse asked. He was still staring into the tin as he ate.

"Not as long as I'm around," Sweetland said.

The boy scooped the last of the fruit into his mouth, tipped up the tin to drink the juice. It was impossible to say what he thought of it all, one way or the other.

"So," Sweetland said. "You just come back on the ferry yesterday, was it?"

"Mom took me to see the doctor into St. John's," he said. Like this was news to Sweetland.

"And what did the doctor have to say to you? You're retarded, is it? Antisocial? Codependent? Mentally unstable? Psychopathic?"

"No," the boy said.

"Well what are you going all the way into St. John's to see him for then?"

He shrugged. "Don't know."

"Your mother's the one should be seeing the doctor."

"She sees him too," Jesse said. "She goes in after me."

Sweetland smiled. "Fat lot of fucken good it's doing her, hey?"

"I don't know," the youngster said.

He'd gone too far, Sweetland thought and he said, "Never mind me." By way of apology.

"I don't mind."

He let out a breath of air, stared away down the valley. Even Sweetland thought it was a lonely life for the youngster sometimes, stuck in that head of his. Surrounded by geriatrics and imaginary friends. And as if on cue, Jesse said, "Hollis went into St. John's to see a doctor one time." "Where'd you hear the like of that?"

"Hollis told me."

Sweetland's brother, the boy was talking about. Dead fifty years or more. "Is that a fact," Sweetland said.

"He was into St. John's most of the winter one year."

Sweetland got to his feet and busied himself picking up their bit of material, packing it away. "Finish up now," he said. A feeling like bugs crawling on his skin he could only get clear of by moving. "We got better things to do than sit around here jawing."

They cleaned the rabbits at Sweetland's kitchen sink. Jesse on a chair to hold them aloft by the hind paws as Sweetland flicked a blade through the fur above the ankles, peeled the coats down the length of the carcasses an inch at a time. Flesh the colour of mahogany and grained like wood. The mottled guts slopping into the stainless steel bowl of the sink.

The phone rang and Jesse jumped off the chair to answer but Sweetland stopped him, afraid it might be Clara. "You wash up," he said. "It's time you got home to your supper."

The boy rinsed his hands under the tap as the phone jangled on awhile. He said, "Are you going out after wood tomorrow?"

"Might be."

"I could help."

"Take one of these down to your pop," Sweetland said, and he slipped a naked carcass into a clear plastic bag. Jesse waiting with his freshly washed hands held out, as if he was about to receive a ceremonial sword. After he'd scoured the sink, Sweetland went out the back porch door and walked around to the front of the house. Looked east and west like someone deciding on a route before he ambled down through the cove. He went by Pilgrim's house, but he didn't so much as glance in the windows, scurried past with his eyes averted.

Sweetland carried on to Duke Fewer's barbershop, a one-room shed next to Duke's house. There was a barber's chair as old as Buckley's goat screwed into the bare plywood floor. One wall mostly mirror, the other pasted with faded photos and newspaper clippings yellowed with age. A buzzing neon light fixture, a coat stand, a sink in one corner, a wood stove opposite to heat the room through the winters. Two wooden chairs along the wall below the photos, and, on a low table between them, a chessboard beside a stack of magazines—National Geographic and Time, Sports Illustrated and Maclean's—that dated from thirty years before and hadn't been touched in nearly that long.

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.