Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada's former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Includes new material.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

The Grey Islands is the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.

Bent, I circle the building grubbing and rooting. Every shingle and stick I lift yields bait. Things Carm ate and didn't eat, turned to worms. A kind of organic shadow of the man.

— from "The Grey Islands"

Praise for The Grey Islands:"[The book] illustrates? how the outsider becomes an insider by becoming a supplicant, renouncing the role of saviour and honouring the culture of the people among whom he has decided to make his home." — Adrian Fowler, from the Introduction.

John Steffler (1947) grew up near Thornhill, ON. In 1975, he began teaching at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook, NL. His novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright won the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Prize for best first book in 1992. His other awards include the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Artist of the Year Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize for his most recent collection, That Night We Were Ravenous.

John Steffler's profile page

"I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau's Walden, Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild... an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and expansive, the difficult and essential encounter of wilderness."
-Don McKay, What is Stephen Harper Reading?

"This is a book of such excellence that someone in the future is liable to say about the author: 'Steffler? Steffler - oh yes, he wrote The Grey Islands, didn't he?'"
-Al Purdy, Books in Canada (1985)