C. J. Yorath

This came up recently on a Name That Book thread. It is not particularly well-written, but it does shed some light on an obscure bit of Canadian history. In 1891, the city of Victoria BC started a leper colony on a small island. The city provided food, clothing and shelter, and other than that, the men were just left on their own. Over the 15 years that Victoria ran the colony, the population ranged from 2 to 9 men, almost all Chinese immigrants.

The book is short, since there was little official documentation, and no accounts were ever given by the men who lived and died on the island. The author fills the story out with a fictionalized account of one of the inmates. This combination of fiction and nonfiction is a technique that I don't care much for, but some people might like it. At times the nonfiction sections read like lists of data, sometimes with the same piece of information repeated on two different pages.… (plus d'informations)