Teeming with life and remembrance, Wake of the Aspy is a novel of family, passion, and the beauty of memory’s heart.The coastal steamer Aspy connected northern Cape Breton to the world. It was a lifeline, an escape route, and a threat to the old ways. Rooted in a woman’s hard-won independence, Stewart Donovan’s terrific, often hilarious storytelling—the sounds and rhythm and acid wit of daily life—faces with vitality the local life and its encounters with government and a tourism future. Despite expropriations, war, cutbacks and social injustice aimed at driving them out, these are survivors you still might be lucky enough to meet Down North.