Critical Praise

"Easily one of the most readable and beautifully written books to emerge...in recent years."

——Mordecai Richler

"Macfarlane offers a book in which personal memoir, history, and reflection on war all come together in one memorable, luminous whole…A remarkable and beautifully written book in which the rich stuff of family and local history join together to entertain, to instruct, and to move deeply."

——Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The Danger Tree is a masterpiece. David Macfarlane is an architect of the past, building extraordinary memory mansions in which the reader feels eerily at home."

——Alberto Manguel

"I first read David Macfarlane's wonderful book while on a long journey around Newfoundland ten years ago: it had an incalculably uplifting effect on my appreciation of this bleak and seaswept but utterly enchanting place. Since then I have returned many times to read passages that continue to exert a curious and powerful hold over me. It is a hold, I know now, that stems from much more than simple nostalgia for a lovely place; it is the realization that The Danger Tree is a true masterpiece, a book that I want all of my friends, and all who I know and care for, to read and savor for years and years to come."

——Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman

"Intense and beautiful…One of the finest and most intriguing miniature elegies that I have read in many a year."

——Christopher Hitchens, Newsday

"Consistently brilliant…A breathtaking evocation of [Newfoundland's] cliffs and rocks and pines, and of the proud and passionate humanity peering out from the dour crags."

——Steve Jensen, San Francisco Chronicle