This is the story of Quoyle, a bumbling, overweight, inarticulate, man whose pain at the death of his unfaithful wife causes him to leave New York and return with his  two young daughters and his aunt to Newfoundland, home of his ancestors.   Quoyle’s gradual transformation as he struggles to adapt to the hardships of life on a windswept island and his job with the local newspaper is described in vivid, humourous prose.   It may take some readers a while to get used to Proulx’s fragmented style of sentence construction, but after a while it seems quite natural.