Baltimore's Mansion - Softcover

Praise for The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

"The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an indispensable masterpiece. It reshapes and animates history with luminous verisimilitude. Every page of Wayne Johnston's stunning novel displays the highest regard for his reader's intelligence and for the art of writing itself...Mr. Johnston has genius in him, and I think haunting, unmitigated, uncanny vision and grace."
--Howard Norman

"This splendid, entertaining novel is both a version of David Copperfield transposed to twentieth-century Newfoundland and an evocation of vanished ways of life in a place caught in tumultuous political changes. Rich and complex, it offers Dickensian pleasures."
--Andrea Barrett

"A novel of cavernous complexity that nevertheless does not overwhelm the reader, who can repose in pure narrative."
--Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review

"As absorbing as fiction can be-and a marvelous introduction to the work of one of our continent's best writers."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer, and his Newfoundland--boots and boats, rough politics and rough country, history and journalism--during the wild Smallwood years is vivid and sharp."
--Annie Proulx

"Grand and operatic...this brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A mighty accomplishment: Here's a novel that is as much a tale of two people as it is a history of the harsh, odd, and ultimately fascinating land from which they hail. There is indeed more to Newfoundland than salt cod and tundra, and Johnston brings it all to life."
--Chris Bohjalian, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A long, impassioned, absorbing novel...bravura storytelling."
--Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

"A capacious, old-fashioned summer hammock of a book--the kind you fall into, enchanted, and hate to leave...I wouldn't have missed the trip for anything."
--Dan Cryer, Newsday

'I am foreborn of spud runts who fled the famines of Ireland in the 1830s, not a man or woman among them more than five foot two, leaving behind a life of beggarment and setting sail for what since Malory were called the Happy Isles...'

So begins Baltimore's Mansion, Wayne Johnston's story of his grandfather Charlie, his father Arthur and of the small community of Ferryland on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, founded as a Catholic community by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s.

Charlie, a fisherman and blacksmith, is an ardent Newfoundland nationalist. His son Arthur, forced from boyhood to fish the freezing seas with his father, vows never to earn his living from Newfoundland's dangerous waters. He leaves the island in the heady months before the fateful 1948 referendum decides Newfoundland's future. While Arthur is away Charlie dies and Newfoundland cedes its independence to Canada, plunging Arthur into a lifelong battle with the personal demons that haunted the end of their relationship. Years later, Wayne Johnston himself decides to leave Newfoundland and old patterns threaten to repeat themselves.

Acclaimed as one of Canada's finest novelists, Wayne Johnston has written an intimate, captivating and deeply felt memoir centred on three generations of his own family. At times harrowing, at others both moving and funny, Baltimore's Mansion, speaks to us all about the hardships, blessings and power of family relationships, of love of country, of exile and of returning home.