Alford Saga

Imagine you're in a swaying hammock on a British manowar around 1800, riding out a harsh spring storm in a deserted estuary. Behind those high red cliffs lie a hundred miles of uncharted wilderness, populated only by ferocious indigenous peoples. If you jump ship and are caught, you will be branded a deserter - subject to death by one thousand lashes. What can you bring to help you survive? Within minutes, the ice-strewn waters will freeze your body and claim your soul. Even if this were your one chance for a life in the New World, would you jump? Thomas Manning did, and his leap into uncertainty begins the epic tale of a pioneer family, one of the many who built our great nation. Through his and his descendants' eyes, we watch one small community's impact on the great events, which swirl about them and bring conflicts they must face in their struggles to create homes and families.

Thomas Manning, branded a deserter from the British Navy, is forced to change his name to James Alford to avoid the death penalty. Determined to forge a new life on the Gaspé Peninsula, he struggles to survive the harsh landscape and win the hand of Catherine Garrett. After working in harsh sub-zero woods, he saves the life of an orphan working in a sawmill, and so gains crucial lumber to build a homestead out of intractable wilderness. But first he must battle murderous brigands to rescue a starving bull calf he hopes will be the first of the oxen he so desperately needs to clear his land. Finally, heroically surviving Canada's worst-ever famine, he faces down implacable bureaucracies to keep the farm he has been fighting to bring under cultivation. A captivating and fast-paced adventure, The Survivor is Book Two of the Alford Saga, a series chronicling two hundred years of Canadian history, as seen through the eyes of one settler's family.

The riveting Alford Saga continues with James Alford, the Deserter, battling old age and ferocious winters, but even more crippling, the departure of his son and only heir, Young Jim, who sets out on snowshoes for Montreal, seven hundred miles away. Arriving at last in Montreal, Jim is driven by starvation into a back-breaking job constructing the Victoria Bridge. Jim finds lodgings with an Irish widow in Griffintown, and falls in love. After being deceived in this romance, he rejects the bitter realities of urban life and returns to the Old Homestead and its community of pioneers. His ageing father recruits him to rally recalcitrant neighbors to found a school for their children and a church for their worship in Shigawake.

In 1896, young rector Jack Alford is sent to the implacable, granite shores of Labrador on the vast St. Lawrence River. Hazards imperil his life as he travels this harsh 450-mile coastline by boat and dogsled, to visit his far-flung parishioners. Jack also manages to rescue a cook from the crew of a schooner to keep him company on his travels. In this fourth book of The Alford Saga, his zeal for the welfare of Labrador's hardy parishioners diverts Jack from his romance. Through summer storms that menace his tiny mission boat and fierce blizzards that almost annihilate his dog team, Jack brings succor to stranded families, care and leadership to villages perched on the windy granite, and, finally, inspired teachings in hill-top churches that stand as beacons of hope among the seal-fishers and rugged pioneers of Labrador.

The Prime Minister gives permission for John Alford to board a tramp steamer crammed with a thousand young enlistees bound for adventure in the Boer War. They steam across a stormy Atlantic into a year of dusty, disease-ridden battles in South Africa - the first engagement by Canadian Forces on foreign soil. He and his courageous comrades endure freezing night-long marches and thirst-ridden days as they mount dangerous attacks on Boer commandoes under a blazing sun, turning the tide of war in the great battle of Paardeberg Drift. He falls in love, but as Chaplain, he must first comfort the dying, tend wounded friends, and with his troops assault the impregnable Thaba 'Nchu, the Black Mountain. This enthralling tale of bravery and self-sacrifice is the first romantic adventure novel set in the Boer War for over a hundred years.

Eric Alford's safe and romantic life on the peaceful Gaspe Coast is shattered by his decision to follow his elder brother John (the Pilgrim and The Chaplain) into the 1914-18 cataclysm of death and destruction known as the "Great War for Civilisation". By his thundering Howitzer, Gunner Alford assaults the Hun through every major Canadian battle of WWI: Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Hill 70, The Somme, and "The Hundred Days" that ended the conflict. A developing romance with a lovely Londoner is cut short by a German shell. Evacuated to a Rouen field hospital, he is surrounded by hellish wounds: blindness, amputations, and gas-inflicted horrors. Finally, back in Blighty among other shell-shock victims, he recovers and returns to his Gaspe home, bereft of his London love and changed forever.

Eric Alford, one of the brave but shell-shocked soldiers of WWI, sets out during Canada's Great Depression to find his British sweetheart. He ends up in Australia, where he finally wins ordination as a clergyman. After an emotionally fraught round the world trip, he arrives home in Quebec only to find his traumas growing worse. He continues to battle it as bravely as he did the enemy, causing heart-rending anguish to himself, his loving bride and his only son. Set in the turbulent twenties and thirties, this story of an earlier hero mirrors with horrifying force the PTSD that afflicts our returning troops today, and offers uplifting lessons about the unquenchable human spirit.

This last novel in the Alford Saga is a stand-alone autobiographical roman a clef about the remarkable life, loves, agonies, achievements and awards of Canada's prestigious movie producer, director, and entrepreneur.