The Man who Came from Away

In 1970, screenwriter Winston Barber comes to Cape Breton to seek out stories that might make good movies. In Glace Bay, he discovers welcome and confrontation, community and conflict, and stories galore...including one in which he finds himself playing the lead.
With this book, Jeremy Akerman returns to the scene of his first novel, Black Around the Eyes. In that book, set in the 1920s, Glace Bay is riding the boom of coal production, and the workers struggle for their fair share of the results. By 1970, Cape Breton coal is well into its long decline, and the action is more often at the pensioners' hall than at the colliery. But some issues, and some passions, do not change.

Jeremy Akerman is an adoptive Nova Scotian who has lived in the province since 1964. In that time he has been an archaeologist, a radio announcer, a politician, a senior civil servant, a newspaper editor and a film actor.He is painter of landscapes and portraits, a singer of Irish folk songs, a lover of wine, and a devotee of history, especially of the British Labour Party. Jeremy's first novel, Black Around the Eyes, was published in 1981. Other projects required his intention until recently, when he was able to take up fiction again. From the start of 2023 to the summer of 2025, he wrote and published eleven novels.