MacLennan, Hugh

Barometer Rising (New Canadian Library)

Penelope Wain believes that her lover, Neil Macrae, has been killed while serving overseas under her father. That he died apparently in disgrace does not alter her love for him, even though her father is insistent on his guilt. What neither Penelope or her father knows is that Neil is not dead, but has returned to Halifax to clear his name.

Hugh MacLennan’s first novel is a compelling romance set against the horrors of wartime and the catastrophic Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917.

The Watch That Ends the Night

Each Man's Son

In Each Man’s Son, his fourth novel, Hugh MacLennan returns to his native Cape Breton to present life in a small mining community.

Dr. Daniel Ainslie, who ministers to the rough miners, yearns for a son, which he can never have. He comes to love young Alan MacNeil, the son of Mollie MacNeil and her absent husband, Archie, who deserted his family several years before to seek his fortune as a professional fighter. Now Archie returns, bitter and defeated, to wreak tragedy on his community.

Originally published in 1951, Each Man’s Son, a stunning account of the rationalistic Ainslie and the animalistic MacNeil, moves inexorably towards its harrowing conclusion.

Two Solitudes

First time in the New Canadian Library

“Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale-coloured and joins the Saint Lawrence, the two streams embrace the pan of Montreal Island, the Ottawa merges and loses itself, and the main-stream moves northeastward a thousand miles to sea.”

With these words Hugh MacLennan begins his powerful saga of Athanase Tallard, the son of an aristo-cratic French-Canadian tradition, of Kathleen, his beautiful Irish wife, and of their son Paul, who struggles to establish a balance in himself and in the country he calls home.

First published in 1945, and set mostly in the time of the First World War, Two Solitudes is a classic novel of individuals working out the latest stage in their embroiled history.

Voices in Time

The future of the novel as an art form

Return of the Sphinx