Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders

The Deptford Trilogy

The kind of writer who makes you want to nag your friends until they read him so that they share the pleasure

Davies' books will be recognized with the very best works of the twentieth century

Thick and rich with humour, character and incident

Robertson Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913. A novelist, playwright, literary critic and essayist, he received numerous awards for his work. It is as a writer of fiction that Robertson Davies achieved international recognition, with such books as The Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties); The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders); The Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and The Lyre of Orpheus); Murther &amp; Walking Spirits, and The Cunning Man. Robertson Davies died in 1995.

At two minutes to six on December 27th 1908 the lives of three people become inextricably bound together by the trajectory of a snowball. There is ten-year old Dunstable Ramsay, intended victim of the snowball, who, fatefully, ducks; his 'lifelong friend and enemy' Percy Boyd Staunton, angered by their recent quarrel, who hurls the snowball; and Paul Dempster, prematurely born when his pregnant mother is struck by Percy's icy missile. Tracing the rich and varied lives of these three individuals, The Deptford Trilogy lures the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic in one of the most beguiling, clever and cunning trilogies ever written.

Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties

The Salterton Trilogy

Impudent, amused, and amusing, and sterling entertainment

Ingenuous, erudite and entertaining. Davies displays all the qualities of a latter-day Trollope

Robertson Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913. A novelist, playwright, literary critic and essayist, he received numerous awards for his work. It is as a writer of fiction that Robertson Davies achieved international recognition, with such books as The Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties); The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders); The Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and The Lyre of Orpheus); Murther &amp; Walking Spirits, and The Cunning Man. Robertson Davies died in 1995.

In the small university town of Salterton, Ontario, dreams are quietly taking shape, or falling apart. There's the Salterton Little Theatre Company, in which professional director Valentine Rich is tormented by the amateurish efforts of his actors. The families Vambrace and Bridgetower almost go to war over a fake notice of engagement in the local paper. And a family fortune is lavished on an aspiring singer because there is no male heir to claim it. Tracing the lives and incidents of a small community in the middle of the last century, The Salterton Trilogy peels off the public veneer of geniality and respectability to reveal the private passions simmering beneath.

The Cunning Man

Irresistible, unflaggingly vital. A wholehearted and sharp-minded celebration of the Great Theatre of Life

A novel brimming with themes of music, poetry, beauty, philosophy, death and the deep recesses of the mind

An amazing coup. Davies has written a brilliant, never less than engaging work of fiction which is also a philosophical meditation on the business of living. I have not read anything so good in a very long time

A wise, humane and consistently entertaining novel

Robertson Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913. A novelist, playwright, literary critic and essayist, he received numerous awards for his work. It is as a writer of fiction that Robertson Davies achieved international recognition, with such books as The Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties); The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders); The Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and The Lyre of Orpheus); Murther &amp; Walking Spirits, and The Cunning Man. Robertson Davies died in 1995.

When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high altar on Good Friday, Dr Jonathan Hullah - whose holistic ideas have earned him the soubriquet 'cunning man' - wants to know why. But it is only through looking back at his own long life that answers are forthcoming. He recalls the dazzling intellectual high jinks of his circle of friends, from the High Church homosexual Darcy Dwyer (an expert on the theory of sin) to the curious occurrence of the Coburg Social Parlour's Seventh Annual Bad Breath Contest. Compelling and hilarious, The Cunning Man is a profound exploration of what it means to be an actor in the divine comedy of life.

Murther & Walking Spirits

Will be recognized with the very best works of this century

Vintage Davies, employing a subtle feeling for family relationships and a genuine understanding of money and power while indulging in effortless intellectual acrobatics

Davies' devotees will recognize at once the master's sharp ear for proverbial wisdoms, his relish for fantastical and dark linguistic corners, his magpie accumulations of odd bits of lore and historical tidbits

An extraordinary tapestry of a book - richly layered, embroidered with detail and stitched together with skill and style

'I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.' 
 
So begins the story of Connor 'Gil' Gilmartin when he catches his wife in flagrante with the Sniffer, his former colleague and now his murderer. Unfortunately, death is only the first indignity Gil is about to suffer. For he lingers on as a ghost, and from this bleak vantage - made even less endurable by the fact that he must spend the afterlife sitting beside his killer at a film festival - he is forced to view the exploits and failures of his ancestors, from the forerunners who sailed up the Hudson to Canada during the American Revolution to his university-professor parents.

Robertson Davies

One of the most remarkable achievements of contemporary fiction

Nourishes the brain while it beguiles the senses

A first-rate storyteller and a real moralist with a crackling sense of humour

Davies combines elements of the fantastic with details of everyday life to show us a world in which the miraculous coexists with the mundane

What's Bred in the Bone, The Rebel Angels, The Lyre of Orpheus

The University of St John and the Holy Ghost (known affectionately as Spook) has a problem - and an opportunity. Strange, eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish has died and faculty members have been made executors of his complicated will. But in the realization of their duties, they find themselves drawn into Cornish's bizarre, secretive and mystical world. In this spellbinding trilogy a host of memorable characters - defrocked, mischief-making monks, half-mad professors, gypsies and musical geniuses - become entangled in a story that involves theft, perjury, scholarship, murder, love, and the squandering of plenty of cash.

Robertson Davies

Praise for The Cornish Trilogy

Deliciously readable

One of the most remarkable achievements of contemporary fiction

Nourishes the brain while it beguiles the senses

Deliciously readable

One of the most remarkable achievements of contemporary fiction

Nourishes the brain while it beguiles the senses

Deliciously readable

One of the most remarkable achievements of contemporary fiction

Nourishes the brain while it beguiles the senses

Books by Robertson Davies

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