Hunting Down Home

From the enigmatic start of this haunting, atmospheric fiction debut, McNeil envelops readers in a stark and stunningly different world. Seven-year-old Morag knows what grandparents are, but for a long time is unaware that she has parents. Her father is glimpsed once in a passing pickup truck (along with his wife and children); her mother is known only through the projected images of slides sent home from her exotic travels. Abandoned to the care of her maternal grandparents, Morag lives on a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia where farming keeps the family just above the poverty line. Still only in their 40s, Morag's grandparents' lives have been informed by the unforgiving landscape, the scars of lost dreams and ambitions. Morag's grandmother is a bitter woman forever enveloped in a fuggy cloud of cigarette smoke, and Morag gravitates to her hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, fiddle- and accordion-playing grandfather. They share a peculiar affinity and rare moments of affection as he teaches her the rules of hunting and warns her: ""never trust anyone."" As her grandparents' ever-violent relationship begins to worsen and Morag becomes a pawn in their deadly tug of war, she achieves a painful maturity in the destructive cycle of family breakdown. Canadian-born McNeil, who now lives in London, has a fierce, ironic eye, a tensile prose style alive with startling imagery and an ability to render both domestic chaos and the renewing hope of a Canadian summer with poetic ease. To her credit. she resists the temptation to tidy everything up, leaving Morag's mother as much of a puzzle to the reader as she is to Morag. As Morag tries to sort out the dichotomies of life in a home ""where uncertainty was predictable""--the possibility of loving one's tormentor, the terrible beauty of the land, the voluptuous self-pity of men mourning lost opportunities--there emerges an awareness of herself as a conscious being, capable of making choices that readers will applaud. Agents, Jane Bradish-Ellames of Curtis Brown U.K.; Anna Ghosh at Scovil Chichak Galen in New York. Author tour. (June) FYI: In 1997 McNeil won the Prism International Fiction Competition and was nominated for the 1998 Journey Prize for Fiction in Canada. She is the author of two Rough Guides.