It is safe to say that in Canada Charles Bruce is considered a regional writer of some distinction. Bruce's artistic vision did focus on a fictional section of the Nova Scotia coast that he called the Channel Shore, a place that bears resemblance to the Chedabucto Bay region at the eastern end of the province where he grew up. In his best poetry Bruce wrote of life on the Shore and, in particular, of the dual current of land and sea within the people there. In his single novel and in his collection of linked short stories, Bruce created Shore families, gave them their own genealogies, and paid attention to the flow of time and to human experience within local history. Few writers in Canada have combined so convincingly the thematic territories of time and place with a writing style that one perceptive critic has classified as "magic...