By the Marshes of Minas

The marshes of Minas were once home to a people who had built their world between sea and sky, their farms reclaimed from the tide over generations. Then came the British ships, the orders, the torch. By the Marshes of Minas is Sir Charles G. D. Roberts' luminous elegy to Acadia lost, following families torn from their homesteads as British authorities in 1755 deported an entire people from the shores they had tamed for a century and a half. The novel moves among the exiled and those who remained, hidden in the woods, scattered across New England, or clinging to the margins of a homeland now made foreign. Roberts writes with the precision of a poet and the melancholy of someone who understands that landscapes hold memory. The salt marshes, the dykelands, the gray light over the Bay of Fundy become characters in a tragedy that is both intimate and vast. This is historical fiction as lament, capturing the particular cruelty of a people made strangers in their own land.