Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father
Description
Shortlisted for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction An adventure story set against the backdrop of a son trying to understand his father After a 25-year break from boating, Brian Harvey circumnavigates Vancouver Island with his wife, his dog, and a box of documents that surfaced after his father's death. John Harvey was a neurosurgeon, violinist, and photographer who answered his door a decade into retirement to find a sheriff with a summons. It was a malpractice suit, and it did not go well. Dr. Harvey never got over it. The box contained every nurse's record, doctor's report, trial transcript, and expert testimony related to the case. Only Brian's father had read it all -- until now. In this beautifully written memoir, Brian Harvey shares how after two months of voyaging with his father's ghost, he finally finds out what happened in the O.R. that crucial night and why Dr. Harvey felt compelled to fight the excruciating accusations.Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
"Sea Trial is a riveting account of two intertwined voyages of adventure and introspection. Brian Harvey writes with wit, intelligence, dry modesty and high style as he tells the stories of a hazardous and difficult sea passage and an exploration of his father's long-ago malpractice trial. A fascinating and wholly engaging book." -- Derek Lundy, author of the bestselling Godforsaken Sea
"Sea Trial is gripping from the very first page. You need to be a good navigator to circumnavigate Vancouver Island, with a ragged western coastline known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. You also need to be a skilled writer to navigate the shoals, cross-currents, and uncertain weathers of such an ambitious floating memoir. Brian Harvey is both." -- Gary Geddes, author of the bestselling Sailing Home and Medicine Unbundled
"Harvey has serious skills, and his riveting story is impossible to put down." -- Cruising World
"Brian Harvey's Sea Trial defies easy description. In fact, that is exactly one of its - considerable -- strengths . . . With a sharp eye for telling detail, and inventive language, Harvey is a writer who knows how to fix on the less to evoke the more." -- The Ormsby Review
"Harvey's fascinating exploration of his father's pain goes well beyond talented description. With sensitivity, he probes his father's emotions and inadvertently his own as he unravels and explains a tragic backstory . . . The trials Harvey encounters -- personal, meteorological, and indeed adjudicative -- are arresting." -- Literary Review of Canada
