See all titles by Brian DoyleBrian
Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a
cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund
Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea---and a rapturous, heartfelt
celebration of life’s surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
Declan
O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean,
having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He
will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and
beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that
very man. . . .
But the galaxy soon presents him with a string
of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of
every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and
misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls
Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new
resident after another, Declan O Donnell’s lonely boat is eventually
crammed with humor, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull.