Leo McKay Jr.'s best-selling novel is set in a small Nova Scotia town,
where a family is changed forever after a devastating mining accident
claims the lives of 26 men. As the story shifts back and forth in time
and between characters, we meet the men and women of the Burrows family:
brothers Ziv and Arvel, drawn to the mine for different reasons; their
father, a former union organizer; Ziv's ex-girlfriend, now living in
Japan; and Arvel's wife, who hopes for a better life for herself in the
city.
In the aftermath of the explosion, and as the investigation into its
causes unfolds, the members of the Burrows family are forced to confront
each other - and themselves - bringing the novel to its moving and
redemptive conclusion. Written in spare, hard-hitting prose, and
inspired in part by the Westray mining disaster, Twenty-Six is a novel
of universal human struggle and understanding that evokes in all its
drama and pathos a community transformed by tragedy.
