The Island Walkers

Information and Book Review

Current TurboBookSnob Ranking: 4

John Bemrose

Mr. Bemrose was raised in Ontario, and now lives in Toronto, where he works as a journalist.  The Island Walkers is his first novel.

The Island Walkers is a richly satisfying family saga following the tribulations and small triumphs of the Walker family, who live in a small mill town in Ontario in the mid-sixties.

Each member of the family faces his own trial, unique in the particulars, but sharing the common thread of class struggle that pervades the fabric of their small community.

Read more

"One hot afternoon during this standoff, he was sitting on the floor of the knitting room, among the parts of a machine he'd spread on newspapers, when the freight elevator floated into its bay.  Alf caught a flicker of bodies moving behind the safety gates.  Then the gates were flung back, and a group of men stepped out.  Their dress shirts, turned back crisply at the cuffs, broadcast a shock of white into the room.  There was a young woman with them: tall, in an extremely short skirt, her long legs stalking forward in black mesh stockings.  A bald, tanned, handsome man touched her back and leaned over to whisper something into the teased cloud of her hair.  She put back her head and opened her mouth in a silent, cheerless laugh, showing a wealth of teeth.

Twenty feet away, Alf instinctively drew up his legs, a man exposed in the bath.  They had stopped outside the elevator.  The bald man, who stood well over six feet, seemed oddly familiar.  But the only figure Alf recognized was Gordie Henderson, assistant manager of the sweater mill, looking around anxiously as if searching for shelter in a thunderstorm.

Read more