We Came From Away

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2025 STEPHEN LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR

On the island of Newfoundland at the edge of North America, if you're not an islander, you're a "come-from-away." And if you were born here and left never to return, according to Nora Houlihan, who is about to turn one hundred, you're the worst kind of CFA. But she's about to have a birthday party and demands that her family return. Before the party, though, she wants them to see what they're missing by living in appalling places like Toronto and New York. So she arranges a cross-island tour for them.

Under the careful eye of their mysterious tour guide, Gordie O'Brien, Nora's two children, both in their seventies themselves, and their assorted middle-aged children are packed into a truck for a week to put aside their petty family squabbles and their prissy food fetishes, their designer handbags and their champagne tastes to experience the things that really matter.

By the time they reach St. John's to celebrate one hundred years of the tactless, obnoxious Nora's life, they have all changed, just not in the way she might have anticipated.

But every family has its secrets, and Nora's family has more than its share of skeletons deeply buried in the closet. And it's time to let them see the light of day. They may scandalize her offspring, but nothing will captivate their imaginations more than the mystery and emotional charge of the place where they were knit.

A love letter to the island of Newfoundland, this enchanting and funny story could only have been written by a "come-from-away."