Excerpt from Sweetland by Michael Crummey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You going up on the mash?" the boy asked.

"Got a few slips out," Sweetland said. "Thought I might see if I had any luck. Clara know you're up here?"

"Mom's still asleep. I told Pop."

"And what did your pop say?"

"He told me not to be a nuisance."

Sweetland nodded. "Get your helmet out of the shed," he said.

Sweetland drove out the back of his property and when they reached the King's Seat at the top of the path Jesse slapped at his shoulder, shouting for him to stop. He jumped off the quad and ran across to the stones, pulling the helmet from his head. The sun just coming up full, the ocean deepening blue in the new light. Jesse skipped up onto the seat and stood with his arms spread wide. "I'm the King of the World!" he shouted, his voice rolling down the hill toward the cove, picking up speed as it went. "I'm the King of the World!"

Sweetland allowed he was the only person in Christendom who hadn't seen that goddamn Titanic movie. Jesse knew the film so intimately he could quote every word of dialogue and sometimes did. He insisted on stopping whenever they passed the Seat and Sweetland waited on the quad while the boy had his moment.

"Come on, Your Highness," he said finally, "the day idn't getting any younger."

Beyond the King's Seat, the trail went east to Vatcher's Meadow where Glad Vatcher summered his animals—half a dozen cows and the bull, twenty head of sheep fenced on forty acres of marsh grass and gorse. There was a gate on both sides so people could cross the meadow when the animals were moved into the barn for the winter, but the summer path circled the field. They drove inland about half a mile, following the barbed wire fence, until they picked up the trail on the opposite side, ravelling east over the headlands to Burnt Head. The plateau was dotted with massive granite boulders that Jesse claimed were called erratics, dropped there by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Is that what they're teaching you in school these days, he'd asked. Saw it on television, Jesse said.

It was a wonder to Sweetland what stuck in the youngster's head. He still insisted on taking off every stitch of clothes just to take a piss and couldn't be counted on to flush the toilet, but he could lecture a body on a hundred different topics—aircraft, the digestive system, moon landings, Mount Everest, ping-pong, whales. Sweetland dreaded getting the boy started on whales. Their Latin names, their numbers and size, their diets, their migration routes, the sound and meaning of their songs. It was as if there was a tape in the youngster's head just waiting for someone to press Play.

Beyond the mash, the trail veered out toward the ocean. Ancient rock cairns placed every twenty feet along the path, to keep walkers from going over the cliff edge in the dark or in stormy weather. Three hundred feet to the surf below. The top of the old light tower was just visible beyond the rise, out on Burnt Head.

Sweetland pulled in behind the abandoned lightkeeper's house which had been sitting unoccupied the ten years since the light was automated. Jesse ran up the rotting steps, holding his hands to the windows and reporting the latest damage. Storm winds had stripped the ocean-side shingles and the relentless wet had rotted through the ceilings, the floors a mess of ceiling plaster and soaked insulation. Mouse shit on every surface. Sweetland hated even to look at the place. "Don't you go inside there," he called.

He took his .22 and backpack off the quad and they headed inland again, the new light flashing on their right shoulder as they walked clear of the ruined building. Just a beacon on a metal tripod drilled into the farthest point of rock these days. A hundred feet north of the beacon there was a helicopter pad built overtop of the Fever Rocks, used by the Coast Guard when they brought supplies to the keeper, or came out for light maintenance. A helipad, Jesse told him it was called.

Excerpted from Sweetland: A Novel by Michael Crummey. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Crummey Ink, Inc. First American Edition 2015. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.