River Thieves, by Michael Crummey <br></br>Downhill Chance, by Donna Morrissey <br></br>Saints of Big Harbour, by Lynn Coady

A gale of fiction is blowing from Canada's Maritime provinces. Jean McNeil (a native of those shores) scans the horizon

Small places are the setting for these three novels from the provinces of Atlantic Canada, known as "the Maritimes". Donna Morrissey's Downhill Chance and Michael Crummey's River Thieves hail from Newfoundland, while Cape Breton Island, 115km south but part of Nova Scotia, is the setting for Lynn Coady's Saints of Big Harbour. These "narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea" – to quote the poet Elizabeth Bishop, raised in Nova Scotia – is not the Canada of fleece-wearing, SUV-driving family units, nor the officially multicultural Canada of Bangladeshi taxi drivers and Italian grocers.

The Maritimes was the first part of the country to be settled, largely by Scots, Irish and French, and their descendants populate them today. For the past 50 years the provinces have been considered a poor Nowheresville, a breeding ground for economic migrants as the Maritime jobless flee a sustained decline governed by depleted cod stocks, rust-belt politics, and cockeyed make-work experiments.

Despite – or because – of its pariah status, lately the Maritimes has experienced a cultural boom in TV comedy, music, and, most recently, in fiction. So far, Maritime novels could be assigned to two rough-hewn camps: the novel of reticent, though sensitive, people and their battle with the elements, written in the choric, magisterial timbre of Gaelic-influenced English (Alistair MacLeod comes to mind), and the novel of broken dreams in pulp mill-and-mining towns that never much tolerated dreams in the first place (David Adams Richards).

The former category has earned more plaudits, but this distinction is fading. The new interest in Maritime fiction encompasses other realities, although this seems less about open-mindedness than the quest by an urban readership for a refuge from cosmopolitan life: a nostalgia for a time when kids were not on Ritalin, when you trapped or fished your dinner.

River Thieves, Michael Crummey's first novel, explores one of the most haunting episodes in Canadian history: the extinction of the Beothuk, Newfoundland's indigenous inhabitants. At the time of contact between European settlers around 1500, they numbered anywhere up to 5,000, but by 1829 the last Beothuk had died – one of the most total extinctions in the history of the Americas.

Crummey enlists a quartet of characters, some based on historical personages, to resuscitate the last days of the Beothuk. John Peyton Senior is an English merchant settled in Newfoundland; his son John captures a Beothuk woman on an expedition to make contact with natives. Cassie, their Shakespeare-reading housekeeper, is minding a dark secret of her own, while Captain Buchan is the man belatedly charged by the British Crown with the Beothuks' welfare.

As a historical project, the book is impeccable in its motives and detail (an expedition takes 3,600lb of provisions, 60 gallons of spirits, 18 hatchets). Crummey carefully outlines tensions between the English, who formed a settler class, and the hardscrabble Irish; and forlornly evokes the despair of the starving remnants of the Beothuk.

But River Thieves runs aground on melodrama – incest, abortion, murder, illicit affairs – and, to a degree, in the old pitfall of historical-talk. Characters speak in an oddly cadenced speech, peppered with cod-historical similes – salmon "fat as a whore's leg". Then there's the problem of historical sex ("cum" doesn't seem at home in the early 19th century). In descriptive passages, however, Crummey is precise and eloquent: "A dark knot of relatives" is the last thing a condemned man sees before being led to the gallows in London.

Poetic description may not be Donna Morrissey's forte, but by God, can she banter. Her second novel, Downhill Chance, is an almost entirely oral work, composed of authentic Newfoundland vernacular: "cripes", "frig", "blabber"; "My, father, it tastes some sweet this year." Hacking through this onslaught of speech, we glean the engaging story of the Gale family, forever changed by father Job's decision to enlist in the Army at the outset of the Second World War. He returns burdened by a terrible secret.

Morrissey is a writer of heroines and villains, of secrets and downfalls, although no character descends into pure stereotype. That she is a skilled ventriloquist is obvious, but one longs for more authorial framing, for an opinion, a context.

Lynn Coady's Big Harbour, like Morrissey's The Basin, is pseudonymous: a necessary strategy employed by Maritime writers so as not to offend webs of uncles, aunts and cousins. It's the early Eighties, and teenager Guy Boucher is labouring under the presence of his Caliban-like uncle Isadore. All he wants is a truck, to get on the hockey team, and go out with Corinne Fortune, who, as her name implies, has the bargain lustre of the small-town beauty. Observant and sensitive, Guy is a sweet kid burdened with a kooky family, until things turn serious when he is falsely accused of stalking Corinne.

Coady has a similar knack for banter, but more of an authorial opinion, and refuses to donate melodrama to violence: "Violence," Guy thinks, "arrives like a natural phenomenon – so arbitrary it could only be from nature, like an undertow at Port Hull beach sucking children out of sight, water wings and all". Her Big Harbour is a parallel universe to the homespun wisdom of Morrissey's lost outport, or the tough frontier history of River Thieves: a modern cocktail of teenage boredom, industrial decline, violence and alcoholism.

With such ingredients, you could make a depressing meal, but Coady's avoidance of easy judgements, and the range and levity of the writing, elevate her work beyond mere smalltown ennui. She employs a mordant wit to expose claustrophobia and the proclivity, magnified in small places, for people to divide into friends and enemies. This is a wholly honest book, which bravely refuses succour for the metropolitan mind addled by internet chats, terrorism, brand awareness and the creep of the impersonal.

Jean McNeil's novel 'Private View' is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson