Sheldon Currie plumbs new depths in this novel inspired byHugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. Ian MacDonald is searchingfor himself, for a career, for home, and for redemption. YetIan, a man with a talent for baseball, seems to find himselfin “the suicide squeeze” all too often as he runs from onewoman to another. Set in Nova Scotia and Quebec, Currie’snovel follows Ian’s quest through his encounters with a torchsingingnun, an old flame, and a woman who seeks more thanfriendship.As Ian struggles to find his place, for a time literally notknowing who he is, Currie guides readers through a journeyfull of eccentric but fully human characters, all trying tolive in worlds that do not always accommodate their dreamsand desires. Two More Solitudes resonates with the burdensof memory, disappointment, uncertainty, death – and mostparticularly with the pleasures and pains of life itself. At timesfunny and poignant, Two More Solitudes is also a rich andsubtle exploration of how Ian and those around him find theirway – in the world, with themselves, and with others.

In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.