<i>"Twelve months in any place, my friend, is quite a weary while And seems more like a century when lived on Sable Isle …"</i> <p>So wrote Thomas Raddall at the age of eighteen, not dreaming that many years later Sable Island – that "hell on earth" – would provide a romantic background for one of his greatest novels, The Nymph and the Lamp.</p> <p>Traumatized by the horror of the great Halifax Explosion of 1917, followed in a few months by the death of his father in battle overseas, Tom was forced to leave school at the age of fourteen.</p> <p>This brief account of his life tells of his early adventures and of how he became one of Canada’s most renowned storytellers.</p>
