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Intro
Disappointment and struggle mark the first 36 years of Quoyle’s life. His father Guy and brother Dick dislike and tease him, as do other children. He drops out of college and although his friend Partridge gets him a job at the local newspaper in their upstate New York town, Quoyle isn’t very good at it. The woman he marries, Petal, cheats on him and treats him poorly. Then, in quick succession, Partridge moves to California, Quoyle’s parents take their own lives, and Petal dies in a car crash after attempting to traffic her and Quoyle’s daughters, six-year-old Bunny and four-year-old Sunshine. When Quoyle’s Aunt Agnis Hamm invites him to move back to the ancestral Quoyle home on Newfoundland, he packs up his daughters and joins her.
The Quoyles have some dark spots in their history. They originally settled just off the Newfoundland coast on Gaze Island where they eked out a living wracking—luring ships into wrecking on the rocks, then pirating the lost cargoes. Eventually dissatisfied with Gaze, one winter they dragged their house across the frozen sea to Quoyle’s Point, which is where Quoyle’s grandparents, Sian and Addy, grew up. The family was marked by incest and sexual abuse in Newfoundland, before Addy moved Guy and Agnis to America. Agnis eventually fell into a career of marine upholstery. She never married but had a long relationship with Irene Warren, who ultimately died of cancer.
Through Partridge’s connections, Quoyle gets a job at the Killick-Claw newspaper, the Gammy Bird, writing up car accidents and the shipping news—the list of boats coming in and out of the harbor each week. Agnis re-establishes her shop. With the help of local carpenter Dennis Buggit, she and Quoyle start fixing up the old house. When Agnis’s clients Bayonet and Sliver Melville come to Killick-Claw in their boat, the Tough Baby (reportedly commissioned in the 1930s for Adolf Hitler), Quoyle writes up a feature about it. Delighted, paper owner Jack Buggit decides to make Quoyle’s boat profiles a regular feature.
Over the summer and fall months, Quoyle befriends Dennis and his wife Beety, harbormaster Diddy Shovel, and fellow newspapermen Nutbeem and Billy Pretty. He also meets Wavey Prowse, a widow whose husband Herold treated her as badly as Petal did Quoyle. Slowly, love blossoms between them. Quoyle faces his fear of the water and learns to pilot a boat across the bay; when his first boat capsizes and sinks, he commissions a new one from local shipbuilder Alvin Yark.
As winter sets in, Agnis moves to St. John’s for a big job, Gammy Bird managing editor Tert Card resigns and Jack promotes Quoyle to that position, Nutbeem leaves for sunnier waters, and Quoyle and his daughters move into a rented house in Killick-Claw. Quoyle learns about a long-lost cousin, Nolan Quoyle, who has been lurking around the house since they arrived and trying to call down misfortune on him, his daughters, and Agnis with a series of intricately knotted strings. It’s clear that Nolan isn’t in his right mind, and eventually Quoyle must choose to have him committed to psychiatric care.
In the early spring, Agnis comes home. That night, a huge storm moves in, blowing the house on Quoyle’s Point off the rock and into oblivion. Despite this loss, Agnis, Quoyle, and the girls all want to stay in Killick-Claw, where they have been welcomed and begun to put down roots.
Not long afterward, Jack goes out lobster fishing and doesn’t return. The Coast Guard finds him tangled in his fishing lines, dead. Although he’d tried to downplay the truth of their mother’s and grandparents’ deaths the previous year, now Quoyle allows Bunny and Sunshine go to Jack’s wake. They’re in the room, then, when Jack miraculously revives. He was in a coma-like state induced by the extremely cold waters, and he makes a full recovery. Buoyed by this sign that a person—any person, including himself—can get a second chance, Quoyle seizes it. He and Wavey get married and move into their new house together with Bunny, Sunshine, and Wavey’s son Herry. In Newfoundland, Quoyle has discovered purpose and joy and now has a life he fully embraces.
