Anyone who has spent time in Cape Breton will recognize the presence of ghosts. The island is a region rich in history, mired in tradition, and full of secret stories that all the locals know. It is a place where the Gaelic language is kept alive by old-timers clinging to their roots and by young people who respect their heritage. Even those who don’t speak the language use common phrases out of habit. This is the Cape Breton brought to life in intimate detail in The Long Stretch.

Like Ann-Marie MacDonald in Fall on Your Knees and Sheldon Currie in The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, Linden MacIntyre has mined Cape Breton’s rich soil for the story of the Gillis clan. MacIntyre, well-known as a broadcast journalist on CBC’s the fifth estate, has turned his hand to fiction with success. His first novel evokes the complex relations that can draw families together and yet slowly drive them apart.

First cousins John and Sextus Gillis share the same family history and bear the burden of the same family secrets. Each thinks he can escape his demons, John by turning to alcohol, Sextus by running away to Toronto. Only when they come together after a 13-year estrangement do they manage to truly confront their past.

During a boozy night in the old Gillis home, the secrets of the Long Stretch (the name of the area where they live) begin to unfold. The cousins reminisce until the truth, if there is any such thing, is revealed. Moving back and forth through time, this dialogue-driven encounter serves to dispel the ghosts and the resentments that haunt these men. As John discovers “… the details, in the end, don’t matter. The story is really – get this – about how we hide from the truth, or let other things get in the way of the truth.”

MacIntyre conveys the language and the landscape of Cape Breton very effectively. The complex family relationships and the strange loyalties of people with a shared experience, good or bad, are made easier to understand. The Long Stretch shows how the ghosts of the past haunt future generations until someone decides to uncover them instead of burying the truth.