![“…the two parts of this intelligent yet passionate novel merge seamlessly into a double-layered, twice as effective, doubly meaningful story … A beautiful musical piece stating and repeating its profoundly moving melody.” — BOOKLIST, starred review
“. . . a moving and engaging read, its memorable images and heart's woes sometimes visceral in their power.”
The Globe and Mail
“Anthony De Sa's first novel, Barnacle Love, explores the pain and poetry of an immigrant's hopes with descriptions so rich they massage the senses. . .Barnacle Love is a book of exceptional balance. It's tender and raw, morbid and surprisingly gentle. However, it is the palpable sadness of the Rebelo family that will stay with readers long after the closing pages.”
The Vancouver Sun
“Barnacle Love has the irresistible allure of familiarity and conviction. You're taken there because the author knows the place. He puts you on the back of his bike and pedals up down those endless alleys.”
The Toronto Star
“This collection of linked short stories speaks poignantly about the wrenchingly opposing forces that can tear an immigrant family apart.. . . Unable either to fit in or stand out, he [Manuel] is any immigrant, every immigrant, always reaching for a dream he cannot have, and never at home.”
The Ottawa Citizen
"Barnacle Love" is a magical work of fiction, a multi-generational tale of old and new worlds, of immigrant fathers and their born-in-Canada sons. Touching, illuminating, and sympathetic, it deserves to be on everyone's summer reading list.”
The Owen Sound Sun Times


Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa. Copyright © 2007 by Anthony De Sa. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. or](Barnacle_Love_files/shapeimage_2.png)
In Barnacle Love, a set of interlinked stories, Anthony De Sa moves with skill and ingenuity between folk tale, myth and narratives of contemporary displacement. The tone is spare and elegiac; the stories are filled with carefully chosen details and sharply drawn characters. They have immense emotional and truthful power. - Colm Tóibín
Anthony De Sa’s dramatic immigrant history is revealed in this series of linked stories often operatic in their tragic proportions and folk-tale in structure. With emotional power, incidents veer daringly in mood from brutal to tender. Anthony De Sa writes of the unbreakable connections between the old and new worlds with a revelatory passion. I have no hesitation in saying his is an astonishing talent. - Wayson Choy
Barnacle Love is a beautiful debut, haunting and elegiac, capturing lives at once as grittily real and as mythic as the sea that forms them. - Nino Ricci