Spit Delaney's Island
Short Stories (1976)
Jack Hodgins

Spit Delaney's Island is Vancouver Island, and its settings - the lush green forests, the pulp mills, the all-encompassing sea, and the ferries crossing to the mainland - permeate this stunning collection of short fiction. Opening and closing with stories about Spit Delaney himself, the operator of Old Number One steam locomotive in the local mill, the volume travels between the harsh world of its people's reality and the comforts of their fantasies.

Winner of the Eaton's B.C. Book Prize.

click here to read the first page

Reviews

Humane and compassionate, Spit Delaney's Island, the first collection of fiction from Jack Hodgins, established him as a writer of extraordinary imagination and dazzling humour.

"Jack Hodgins has done for the people of Vancouver Island what John Steinbeck did for the inhabitants of California's Salinas Valley and William Faulkner did for the American South. He has burned them into the national consciousness."

The Gazette (Montreal)

"These are the early works of a great composer: the early chamber works of a man who has taught himself to write for a talking orchestra, with seats and parts for everyone in town."

Robert Bringhurst