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ISBN 9780312195441 (0-312-19544-3, 0312195443)

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0312195443 (0-312-19544-3)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:

Winner of the Governor General's Award

Counterpointing the stories of the legendary Western cowboy Shorty McAdoo and Harry Vincent, the ambitious young screenwriter commissioned to retell his story in 1920s Hollywood, this novel reconstructs an epic journey through Montana into the Canadian plains, by a group of men pursuing their stolen horses.

The Englishman's Boy intelligently and creatively depicts an American West where greed and deception are tempered by honor and strength. As Richard Ford has noted, "Vanderhaeghe is simply a wonderful writer. The Englishman's Boy, spanning as it does two countries, two centuries, two views of historythe Canadian Wild West as 'imagined' by Hollywoodis a great accomplishment. Readers, I think, will find this book irresistible."

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Englishman's Boy, the - 24 Copy Bin

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0733807119 (0-7338-0711-9)
Softcover, Transworld Publishers Limited

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Englishman's Boy, the - 24 Copy Bin: ISBN 0733807119 (0-7338-0711-9)
Softcover, Transworld Publishers Limited

ISBN 9780771086915 (0-7710-8691-1, 0771086911)

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Homesick

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771086911 (0-7710-8691-1)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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Although Homesick won Guy Vanderhaeghe the Toronto Book Award, given to honour books "evocative of Toronto," it is really a very orthodox Prairie novel. Set in the tiny Saskatchewan town of Connaught, Homesick sympathetically explores the confines of a shattered family with the sensibility of a latter-day Sinclair Ross.

As Homesick opens, the Monkman family lies in a state of emotional ruin. Alec Monkman lives alone in Connaught, dreaming of drowning and half-heartedly tending the local businesses that he has come, almost accidentally, to dominate. His widowed daughter, Vera, whom he has not seen or spoken with since she left home to join the Women's Army Corps during the Second World War, is returning to Connaught on a bus with her teenage son, Daniel, who has been showing signs of running wild in Toronto. Alec attempts to treat Vera's return as a simple reunion, but she is having none of it--the old conflicts in the Monkman family have been aggravated by their years apart, allowing the old father-daughter feud to become even more venomous. As Daniel and Alec grow closer to one another, and as a mining operation turns Connaught into a thriving western boomtown, the Monkmans enter even more treacherous territory: old family secrets begin to come to light, threatening to further shred this already fragmented family. Vanderhaeghe tells a straight, sympathetic story, giving all his characters the benefit of a compassionate hearing, sliding into their pasts in order to justify their disjointed present, and vividly imagining their cold, bleak prairie town. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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The Last Crossing

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0349117268 (0-349-11726-8)
Softcover, Little, Brown Book Group Limited

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Set in the late 19th century, The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe's first novel since his acclaimed Englishman's Boy, is the story of three well-off English brothers: twins Simon and Charles Gaunt and their elder sibling, Addington, a former soldier and an arrogant scoundrel. At the behest of their dictatorial father, Charles and Addington travel the prairies of the U.S. and Canada in search of sensitive Simon, who has disappeared. Much of the novel concerns their journeys--bottles of port and claret rattling in their wagons--through Indian country with a cast of intricately drawn, fully realized characters. The small troupe is led through the whiskey-coloured light by Jerry Potts, a half-breed with one foot firmly in each world. The heart of the plot involves the love that Charles, a painter, feels for Lucy Stoveall, a simple but lovely country woman who accompanies them, secretly intent on avenging her sister's murder. However, the most intriguing character in this marvelous collection of all-too-human personalities is Custis Straw, a Bible-reading, heavy-drinking Civil War veteran who hides his tremendous dignity behind a bumbling facade, and who also loves Lucy.

Vanderhaeghe's rich language reveals a genuine feel for the prairies and their rough settlements: "a boom town draws rogues like a jam jar draws wasps," he writes, and describes "miles of wet plain patched with apple green, new penny copper, glints of silver." Though this is a Western in the traditional sense, Vanderhaeghe never sinks into parody. Rather, he uses the Western motif to reveal a number of profound universal truths about personal honour, and human failings and strengths. His humane character depictions reach emotional depths found in few novels today. --Mark Frutkin [via]

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ISBN 9780771086847 (0-7710-8684-9, 0771086849)

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Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771086849 (0-7710-8684-9)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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First published in 1982, Guy Vanderhaeghe's Man Descending, a collection of 12 finely crafted short stories set mostly on the Canadian Prairies, won Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction (an award that Vanderhaeghe won again in 1996 for his novel The Englishman's Boy). Showing tremendous range, Vanderhaeghe is equally adept at taking on the voice of an 11-year-old boy stuck on a dusty farm or an unemployed husband (the "descending man" of the title) whose marriage, like his scotch, is on the rocks. His characters--men, women, or children--are wholly believable and achingly human. There are no superheroes here, just real human beings with all their foibles and failings, charms and weaknesses.

Vanderhaeghe is particularly skilled at describing his creations: the grandmother with a "vinegary voice"; the father who was a "desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man"; the child who is "loose-jointed" and "water-boned" with boredom; the husband with the "I'm-a-harmless-idiot-don't-hit-me smile." The dialogue flows with the patterns and ripples of genuine speech caught alive and still breathing, especially in "Going to Russia," in which a lunatic recalls his interview with a doctor. As they discuss a series of letters in a wonderfully resonant and twisting conversation, the two characters turn out to be tracing the ways art imitates life (and vice versa). These are rich, satisfying stories with a touch of wry humour. Despite their layers of meaning, which can reward rereading, they travel lightly. They are like the Prairies, in fact: allowing a clear view all the way to the horizon but revealing intriguing detail on closer inspection. --Mark Frutkin [via]

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ISBN 9780771086830 (0-7710-8683-0, 0771086830)

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My Present Age

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771086830 (0-7710-8683-0)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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ISBN 9780771099748 (0-7710-9974-6, 0771099746)

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St. Urbain's Horseman

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771099746 (0-7710-9974-6)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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Book summary:

Mordecai Richler himself referred to St. Urbain's Horseman as his "first long novel," and a measurable maturity separates it from earlier, slimmer novels such as The Incomparable Atuk or Cocksure. Here is the same merciless comic wit, but pointed questions about life move from implication to centre stage.

Thirtysomething film director Jake Hersh forsakes parochial 1950s Canada--"thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self-apology"--for cosmopolitan and soon-to-be-swinging London. Blessed quickly in family and work, Jake becomes more despondent as his success brings him from the mean streets of his Montreal youth to regular deliveries from Harrods. He wonders repeatedly, as a father and a husband, what he's doing to avenge the Holocaust. It is here that Richler invokes the Jewish golem myth that will figure in each of his later novels. Like the golem, the legendary clay automaton of Prague who silently protected his people, Jake's older cousin Joey has always been immune from indecision and ready for revenge, and he stands to Jake as a living reproach to his own complacent comfort.

Jake's self-appointed "moral editor," Joey appears in Jake's dreams as a Spanish Civil War hero and tireless Nazi hunter (while in fact he may just be a career debtor and a deadbeat husband to a handful of women). Questions of the independence of identity, the burden of history, and the ingredients of happiness haunt Jake and his readers. What can Jake (or any of us) do about the past? Weepingly funny, touchingly romantic, and unabashedly critical, St. Urbain's Horseman interrogates the good life, repeatedly invoking Auden to warn, "Not all the candidates pass." --Darryl Whetter [via]

More editions of St. Urbain's Horseman:

St. Urbain's Horseman: ISBN 0771099746 (0-7710-9974-6)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

ISBN 9780771086984 (0-7710-8698-9, 0771086989)

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Things As They Are

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771086989 (0-7710-8698-9)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0771098944 (0-7710-9894-4)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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The Tomorrow-Tamer: ISBN 0771098944 (0-7710-9894-4)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

ISBN 9780143051428 (0-14-305142-3, 0143051423)

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The Wars

by Timothy Findley, Guy Vanderhaeghe

ISBN 0143051423 (0-14-305142-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

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Book summary:

Timothy Findley's slim, dense novel The Wars offers nothing short of an explanation of human violence. However alien or mad Findley's World War I events become, war itself is repeatedly depicted as damnably quotidian. A front-line nurse confesses, "the passions involved were as ordinary as me and my sister fighting over who's going to cook the dinner. And who won't." Bringing Dostoyevsky's moral palette to the trenches of the Great War, The Wars seems compelled to reveal how the same men who save one another's lives will also torture trench rats or stray cats for sport.

Written in surgically precise prose and studded with unforgettable scenes and memorable characters, The Wars is Findley at his best. In Cambridgeshire are "towns with names like Camden Lights and Grantchester--roads that wind past canals and over bridges--whirl you round a hundred village greens, scattering geese and waving at children--whip you past the naked swimmers in the ponds and deposit you at inn yards where the smell of ale and apples makes you drunk before you've passed the gate." Informed, compassionate, and insightful, The Wars is uniquely sensitive to the causes of social division and union. --Darryl Whetter [via]

More editions of The Wars:

The Wars: ISBN 0143051423 (0-14-305142-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

Guy Vanderhaeghe

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Guy Vanderhaeghe

new books, used books, rare books by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.

Coauthors & Alternates

Learn More at LibraryThing

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site:

Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.