Ghost of the Southern Cross

By Nellie P. Strowbridge

“Your life story didn’t begin with you. It reaches back to the beginning of time. You rose from the bodies of your ancestors. You’re the witness to their existence.”

There is nothing more alive than the sea, nothing more deadly . . .

Two childhood friends, Maggie and Elizabeth, are irrevocably joined by their love for one man lost on the Southern Cross, a brother to one and a groom-to-be of the other. Lives of families come into focus against the background of the island of Newfoundland, taking readers on a journey beginning more than a century ago and continuing to the 1970s.

The lost vessel becomes a ghostly presence along the rugged shores of Newfoundland during a torturous wait for news, a lingering disruption in people’s lives that brings no relief. A loss comes for which the church offers solace, the graveyard none.

Motivated by her family connection to the disappearance of the Southern Cross and its 174 sealers during the March 1914 voyage to the icefields, the author stitches together the lives of women and men cut from strong, enduring fabrics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771173278

Nellie P. Strowbridge

Nellie P. Strowbridge is one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most beloved, prolific, and respected authors. She is the winner of provincial and national awards and has been published nationally and internationally. Her work is capsuled in the National Archives as this province’s winner in Canada’s Stamp of Approval Award for a letter written to Canada 2117. A former columnist, editorial writer, essayist, and award-winning poet, Strowbridge has won the NL Arts and Letters Awards a record seventeen times. Al Purdy included her in the Sandburg Livesay Award Anthology No Choice but to Trust, featuring outstanding populist poets around the world. She has been Writer in the Library, a mentor to young writers, an adjudicator in the NL Arts and Letters Awards, an assessor on the NL Projects Grants Committee, and a judge for the WANL Book Awards and Fresh Fish Awards. Strowbridge has held school workshops in Canada and Ireland and hosted a Seminar/Gabfest for International Women’s Day in Cobh, where she was writer-in-residence. The Canadian Embassy in Dublin sponsored a reading and reception for her. She also read from her work during a Scotland bus tour. The author is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), The League of Canadian Poets (2009 NL and NS Representative), the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador (WANL), and Page One.