This was the first book by David Adams Richards that I read. It is set in a small town in New Brunswick and tells the story of a number of young people in the community before and after the murder of a woman in the summer of 1974. Very powerful writing that pulls no punches. ( )

David Adams Richards' Mercy Among the Children was really my top book of 2009. It was so incredible that I hesitated over reading another one of Richards' books. The Bay of Love and Sorrows is the powerful tale of ambition and betrayal in a small Nova Scotia town in the 1970s. Karrie Smith and Tom Donnerel are sweethearts who, after her first year of college, have a falling out. Karrie gives in to her attraction to Tom's former friend, Michael Skid who lures Karrie into a manipulative and loveless relationship. Michael, in turn, is manipulated by a drug dealer, Everette Hutch. Those who look to Michael to help and/or protect them are disappointed to learn how incapable he really is of taking a stand.

Richards's is simply an incredible writer. I know he's won awards in Canada, but, really, the man deserves a wider audience. The characters are well written but flawed; the plot is tightly defined. The intensity of the story was, at times overwhelming. You could see destruction coming, they could see it coming, and yet no one stopped it. Richards firm grasp of and insight to the human condition is, at times, heart breaking. I liked how one Amazon reviewer put it: "Although the reader will have affinity with the characters' very human flaws, Richards never allows us to get too close and I believe he does that deliberately; this fiction takes an in-depth look at the shallowness of living on the edge and the waste that it is."
Very Highly Recommended - but a book full of sorrow; http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/
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I have been a big fan of Richards ever since I started reading him maybe twenty years ago. He deals always with the socially, culturally, intellectually deprived; a great swath of people who live day-to-day, who are buffeted by their emotions, who do not, or can not plan for a better, or even at least a different, future but who still, sometimes, find purpose and maybe direction in life, precisely because they are stripped of all the accoutrements of class, standing, and the performances required to maintain them.
This is a story of misdirection, miscommunication, and misunderstandings; of a rich kid (Michael Skid) slumming (his father is a judge) because it is cool and unbridled, but he gets in way over his head, and finds out too late that he cannot simply pull back, or out, of the life that he has forged through his own actions. And those actions have disastrous consequences for a number of characters in the book. There is one man (Everette Hutch) in particular, whom Michael thinks he can control because Michael is so much smarter and better advantaged in life, but he finds to his dismay, his horror, and his ultimate downfall that Everette has always been in control, weaving a web of intrigue precisely because he is totally focused on his own desires and needs, and since he has no conscience and no qualms about whom he uses or hurts in the process, he is a much more dangerous person that Michael could have ever contemplated. His is the chronicle of life wasted and lost:

His life had trailed in a vacuum of petty hopes and disillusions. His voice, like the voices of all the powerful, contained nothing special in its vocabulary, but rather rested only on how things were said.

"The world beat and hated me long before I hated it. I kept asking it not to hate me and begged it not to hate me and my sister--but it wouldn't listen."

There was an ooze of broken dreams that seemed to collect on his skin, on his breath...

The story is fine exploration of the insidiousness of small moral compromises that accumulate and lead one to a position that would have been unthinkable from the original starting point. Michael seduces and betrays the girlfriend/fiancé of an old friend of his with whom he had a silly falling out years before, and in the process betrays Madonna Brassaurd, a tough young woman living on the edge of the violent, spiralling downward life, but who begins to claw her way out of the morass, only to sacrifice herself in the end to save the life of Michael. It is the aftermath of the murder of the ex-fiancé that begins to bring Michael's life and world crashing down about his head.

Richards never moralizes. He describes his characters and their lives, and lets them live and change and die in their own circumstances. His description of a moment with Gail Hutch, sister of Everette, a poor, uneducated, sickly woman trying to survive and forever at the mercy of her brother's violence and his rage:

Suddenly Gail began to cough and the boy began to pat her back. Then he ran over to the counter to get her inhaler. The inhaler, shaped like a squirt gun, with yellow tape about the handle, looked in part as if its function was to be a poignant reminder of Gail Hutch's humanity, a humanity, when looked upon, as glorious as any other.

Towards the end, Michael, now totally exposed, friendless, and ostracized from his family and social group, deliberately sinks the sailboat that had played such an important part in the drug running that he did with Hutch. This leaves him stranded a fair piece from land; he sets out to swim it, not caring whether he makes it or drowns. It might almost have been the best place to leave the reader, not being sure what had happened to Michael. But Richards seems to feel a need to tidy the story up at the end and to lay out the lives of the main characters. Michael obviously survives the swim because he ends up a hermit in Colombia who is murdered when he tries to stop the abuse of townspeople by some bandits. I found this less satisfying and little mechanical.

But this cavil aside, I enjoyed the book. RIchards is a very fine writer with a clean, simple style, but with an empathy for the humanity of all that shines through in his stories.