Away from My Island

Eliza Gill was not famous. She was an ordinary but strong-willed woman with a limited education from a remote Newfoundland outport. Her life, as recounted in Away from My Island, was a struggle from its impoverished beginning to its heroic end. Her options were limited, but she made the best of them and was mostly happy.

Unlike most women in her situation, her story has been written down — and readers will be richer for having read it. They may recognize in Eliza Gill qualities that are similar to those possessed by their mothers, grandmothers or aunties — women who, when faced with a seemingly impossible task, just did it, because “there was no one else” to do it.

Highlights of Away from My Island include details of Gill’s hard-working childhood, which included a stint as an unpaid cook on a small fishing boat. Born in 1914, Gill married young and moved to Toronto, where she befriended a Holocaust survivor whose horrific stories haunted her for the rest of her life. When Gill’s husband became disabled, the family returned to their home province, where Gill scratched out a subsistence living to support them.

Garry Collins, known as the “Story Man” in Newfoundland and Labrador, wrote this book about his mother-in-law because “there was no one else” who was going to write it. He alternates the narrator’s voice with Gill’s first-person account, producing a text that is factual while including imagined dialogue. This highly readable story is Collins’s 16th book.