David Adams Richards of New Brunswick is one of the most promising writers to emerge from the maritime provinces in the 1970s. The author of four novels, a collection of short stories, and an early book of poems, Richards has engaged the possibilities of literary regionalism with remarkable freshness and vigor. Like William Faulkner, with whom he has been compared, Richards turns his relentless gaze on his own "postage stamp of native soil" and discovers there a moral and metaphysical microcosm of the human condition.

Richards, the son of William Angus and Margaret Adams Richards, was born and raised in Newcastle, New Brunswick, a town of about six thousand inhabitants, situated near the mouth of the Miramichi River in the northeast corner of the province. Dependent on shipping, mining, and small farming, the Miramichi Valley has remained for several decades economically depressed, losing much of its population to...