I’ve owned a copy of The Afterlife of George Cartwright for at least twenty years, and recently I decided I needed to either read it or get rid of it. Happily, I decided on the former, and much to my surprise, this was a really interesting fictional approach to the story of one of the primary colonizers of Labrador in the 17th century. There’s a bit of a magical realism element to it, since when we first meet George, he’s dead, but living his afterlife two hundred years on. The book incorporates some of Cartwright’s actual diaries as well as the author’s creative license. While Cartwright is in many ways a fascinating, and (for his time) not a completely deplorable man, some of his actions were breathtaking in their indifferent brutality—particularly his treatment of wild animals and the Inuit people he encountered. The character I was most interested in was his housekeeper cum common law wife, Mrs. Selby, who travels with him from Britain and is unapologetic in her unorthodox views. I’d read an entire book just from her perspective.