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AcadiaAlfred Silver360 pages Order this book: |
![[Cover of Acadia]](../images/189590062X.jpg)
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As in Alfred Silver's previous historical novels, the most outrageous twists and turns and surprises in Acadia are the documented ones he would never have had the nerve to invent. Acadia is the true story of the blood feud that founded the French colony and the two very different married couples at the centre of it.
In the 1640s, the authorities in Paris allowed two men to believe each was the sole Governor of all Acadia. Charles La Tour was a wiry and wily self-made man who lived in Acadia for thirty years. Charles de Menou d'Aulnay was a relative newcomer, son of one of the oldest families in French nobility, and had good reason to regard La Tour as an unprincipled, uncivilized rogue. Jeanne Motin was d'Aulnay’s much younger wife. Françoise Marie Jacquelin was the retired Parisian actress whom La Tour inveigled to come marry him in Acadia.
What Jeanne Motin doesn't know is that her aristocratic husband is driving them ruinously into debt. What Françoise Jacquelin doesn't know, at first, is that her husband tends to respond to any perceived threat by drawing his sword. The struggle for Acadia escalates through skirmishes, sea battles, and sieges. The culmination comes when Françoise defends her husband's fort, leading a vastly outnumbered band of ruffians to hold off d'Aulnay's men-at-arms and warships.
About Acadia:
"...a rollicking read about the escapades of those larger-than-life characters who dominated the early days of European thirst for dominance in the New World..."
– Atlantic Books Today, Summer 2000
Alf Silver was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and grew up in Winnipeg and various other cities and small towns across the Prairies. His secondary education ranged from day-labourer to short-order cook to nude modelling to playing in bar bands, with a few eccentric electives along the way. After two years as Playwright-in-Residence at The Manitoba Theatre Centre, he moved to Toronto for a few years and then to an old farmhouse in central Nova Scotia.
He has published nine novels, including Three Hills Home and The Haunting of Maddie Prue, and three of his stage scripts have been published. More than forty of his radio scripts have been produced by CBC, including the Unnamed Planet tetralogy, The Man Who Thought Ian Tyson Was God, and the Clean Sweep mystery series. He recently recorded a second album of his own songs, They Don't Make 'em Anymore. His definition of "versatile" is "Any gig in a storm."
Winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and now in his fifties, Alfred Silver is proud to say he's never spent longer than one night in jail or more than two weeks in a psychiatric institution.