Seldom marks the literary debut of an amazingly talented writer, Dawn Rae Downton, whose mother, Marion, grew up in a tiny Newfoundland outport in the years before the island joined Canada in 1949. In prose that captures the rhythms of Newfoundland speech, Downton tells the mesmerising and heartrending story of her mother's family - and of their neighbours - people so well acquainted with tragedy that for them life was ultimately more mysterious than death.