John Bemrose’s highly acclaimed national bestseller tells the story of a family who slips from fortune’s favour in a southwestern Ontario mill town during the mid-1960s. Like his father before him, Alf Walker is a fixer in the local textile mill. When a labour dispute forces him to choose between loyalty to his friends and his own advancement, Alf’s actions inadvertently set in motion a series of events that will reverberate far into the future. Meanwhile, Alf’s wife, Margaret, must reconcile her middle-class upbringing with her blue-collar reality, as her marriage is undermined by forces she cannot name. And after their eldest son, Joe, falls headlong for a girl he first glimpses on a bridge, the boy finds his world overturned by the passion and uncertainty of young love. At once intimate and epic in scope, The Island Walkers follows the Walker family to the very bottom of their night, only to confirm, in the end, life’s regenerative power.


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NOMINEE 2004 - Man Booker Prize
NOMINEE 2003 - Scotiabank Giller Prize

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Biographical Introduction to The Island Walkers by John Bemrose

More than anything I’ve written, I think, The Island Walkers was inspired by the place where I grew up during the Fifties and Sixties. This was Paris, in southwestern Ontario, my family’s home for almost a hundred years now. Paris was – and is – an exceptionally pretty town, with its two forking rivers, its steep hills, its bridges and fine old houses, but for me it has always meant something more. It’s a place saturated with narrative. And this came about because of the many stories my parents and grandparents told me. I couldn’t look at a street and see only a street: It was also the spot where my twelve-year-old father had chased a herd of escaped cows. And over there was where my grandfather had fought and defeated the Indian who had spit in his tool box. These events were so real to me, that I lived in a kind of mythic landscape, and consequently was held by a sense of belonging – sometimes comforting, at others suffocating – that I haven’t found anywhere since.

The beauty of Paris was part of this. The light striking under bridges, even the strangely haunting cry of the steam whistle calling the workers to Penman’s knitting mills – these things marked me, and in some way, oppressed me, because as I grew older I began to feel that it was incumbent on me to do something with it all. I had to let people know. In some very real way, the town made me a writer. I was in my early twenties when I started trying to put Paris into a novel – but those early attempts were failures. I just hadn’t lived or written enough. In any case, I went on with other things. When I graduated from university in 1970, I went to work as a sales rep for New Press, an upstart publishing company in Toronto. I was the company’s only salesman, and my territory – which I covered in a green Volkswagen “bug” – was the entire country of Canada. (This is another way of saying, perhaps, that I’m grateful for what the sales reps among you are doing for me out there, as only someone can be who’s lugged his sample cases through minus thirty-degree temperatures in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.) Later I went to England, wrote a novel, which I wisely decided not to publish, and met the lovely woman from West Virginia whom I would marry. Back in Toronto, I became a father, published a couple of books of poems, staged a play, and earned my living as a freelance arts journalist, mostly doing reviews and profiles for Maclean’s magazine, where I’m still a contributing editor.

I was also filling drawers with half-finished novels, increasingly aware that I hadn’t accomplished the central task of my writing life. I hadn’t written the “Paris” novel and with age fifty looming I knew I had to start soon or miss my chance. So in the winter of 1996 – spurred on by jealousy of a friend who’d won a big literary prize – I began The Island Walkers.

I figured the project would take two or three years. It took six, as the story expanded to accommodate the tidal wave of ideas and feelings that had built up over the decades. And the curious thing was this: each time I sat down to write about the fictional town of Attawan – about Alf’s hard choices and Joe’s first love – I seemed to re-enter the vivid atmosphere of Paris as I had known it. Most of the stories in the novel are invented, as are all of its characters. But Attawan is Paris clear through, and if there is any poetry in the novel, any joy in the telling, this has flowed, I think, from some never-broken connection with my childhood. Even while writing the novel’s darkest scenes, I felt myself in some queer way to be eight years old again, trailing happily over the Lions Park footbridge, stopping to look up the river where it gleamed in its distant reaches like the future I was sure held something marvellous.

I’ve told the story from several points of view, using the Walker family as a microcosm for the stresses and conflicts of society – for the fullness of society in all its variety of age, class, sex, and experience. But just as any family is a mystery to the society around it, so the Walkers are mysterious to each other: each locked in a solitude that envisions the world in what I hope are unique and surprising ways. And yet everyone in the book is also bound to everyone else by a matrix of humanity and place they are often unaware of. We belong to each other, I think, and to a common fate, even in the hell and solace of our aloneness.

I think that literature, if it’s to have any value at all, must have the courage for unhappiness. I’ve tried to be honest in following the Walkers to the bottom of their night. But at the same time, every good story dances its way through the shades, with all the sprightliness, poetry and music it can muster. The real hope is there, in the flame we make as we go out. I believe The Island Walkers is a happy book.


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“A beautiful, elegiac novel about place, family, and community. A profoundly moving book.”
–Guy Vanderhaeghe

“As Margaret Laurence staked out a world, Manawaka, in her novels and David Adams Richards has mined the Miramichi, Bemrose has created the vivid community of Attawan to tell an archetypal tale.”
–Halifax Chronicle-Herald

“An astonishing debut, a big and breathtaking family novel that is both understated and passionate.”
–Booklist

“[An] extraordinary debut novel.… Encompassing, bountiful, beautiful.…”
–Globe and Mail

“A great reading experience, and Bemrose has now become a fiction writer to watch.”
–W.P. Kinsella, Books in Canada

“A clear-eyed eulogy for a town and way of life that is gone forever.”
–Sandra Martin, Globe and Mail

“We don’t have many novels that cross generations like this and give us both the interior of lives, a sense of social history, and an incredibly strong sense of place. The story is ambitious, and yet simply, beautifully told. The whole thing flows along like a river – a real page-turner with Dantean echoes and lyrical insights that are often breathtaking.”
–Marni Jackson

“A powerful debut novel.”
–Library Journal

“The Island Walkers is thick with natural beauty and social insight.… A profoundly sensitive portrayal of a family’s efforts to find its way through the tangled threads of desire and nobility, guilt and love.”
–Christian Science Monitor

“As fine as any novel you will read this year.”
–New York Sun


“Richly textured and multilayered.… Masterful.… A beautifully realized and emotionally resonant novel that stays with you long after you turn the last page.”
–Kitchener-Waterloo Record

“[An] accomplished first novel.…”
–Publishers Weekly

“Rhythmical prose, a strong sense of physical place and a restrained, moving atmosphere of mourning for the past.”
–National Post

“A finely wrought first novel.…”
–Kirkus Reviews

“A compelling human story.… [This] beautifully crafted debut novel should earn Bemrose a place in the Canlit pantheon.…”
–Edmonton Journal

“The book’s sense of place, its sense of the acceleration of time between generations, its sudden, surprising insights, give the sprawling story its impressive weight.… A riveting read.…”
–London Free Press

“Bemrose has a talent for capturing the sad lyricism of ordinary lives.… Bemrose’s poetic touch finds beauty in obscure corners and grandeur in small victories.”
–Baltimore Sun



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John Bemrose’s first novel, The Island Walkers, was a national bestseller and a finalist for The Giller Prize. Bemrose is also well known as an arts journalist whose articles and profiles have appeared regularly in Maclean’s, where he is a contributing editor. In the past, he has written for CBC Radio’s Ideas, for the National Film Board, for the Globe and Mail, and for numerous other publications. He has also written a play, Mother Moon, produced by the National Arts Centre, and has published two poetry collections. Bemrose grew up in Paris, Ontario, the place that inspired the setting for The Island Walkers.

Bemrose has lived in Toronto since 1970. He is at work on his second novel.


From the Hardcover edition.

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