Timothy Findley fue un autor canadiense reconocido por su magistral dominio del estilo Southern Ontario Gothic, término que él mismo acuñó. Profundamente influenciado por la psicología junguiana, sus obras exploran frecuentemente las complejidades de la salud mental, el género y la sexualidad. Findley creó hábilmente personajes agobiados por oscuros secretos y conflictos internos, llevándolos a menudo al borde de la psicosis. Su voz distintiva y profundidad literaria lo convierten en un narrador cautivador cuyas historias resuenan en los lectores a través de su intrincación psicológica y profunda visión de la psique humana.
Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, goes to war - the War to End All Wars. He finds himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare; of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Ross performs a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death. The Wars is quite simply one of the best novels ever written about the First World War.
Published in 1984, Not Wanted on the Voyage is one of Timothy Findley's most imaginative and compelling literary fictions. Findley turns to one of our essential myths: the biblical story of the great Flood, but he doesn't so much retell it as take our common knowledge of the Old Testament tale and give it an extraordinary twist. Here we have Dr. Noah Noyes, diabolical conjuror and dictatorial leader of his helpless little boat-bound band, sure of his total superiority as man, husband, and father, imposing his view of the ways of God on his wife and family. The kind and generous Mrs. Noyes stands in direct contrast to her hard-hearted husband, and then there are the Noyes children: strongman Japeth, every inch his father's son, with his delicate wife, Emma; and the sensitive Ham, every inch his mother's, with his mysterious wife, Lucy (a.k.a. Lucifer, who, having escaped from Hell, has decided to align himself with mankind). Findley, a great lover of cats, also gives us the crotchety Mottyl, making her way through her ninth and final life. Not Wanted on the Voyage is poetic and passionate and bursting with a wide-eyed inventiveness, at once a stunningly contemporary attempt at mythmaking, a grand novel of the power of the imagination, and a thoroughly good read. --Jeffrey Canton
In the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament -- the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in scandal and political corruption. The exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, von Ribbentrop, Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, Sir Harry Oakes -- all play sinister parts in an elaborate scheme to secure world domination.
"A distilled and refined novel." --Gail Anderson-Dargatz It is Hollywood 1938. A great star is planning a stunning comeback, while another is bent on self-destruction. And, as dark clouds hang ominously over Europe, hordes of Monarch butterflies swarm beautifully but menacingly over Hollywood. Against a colourful backdrop of butterflies and beaches, Timothy Findley skillfully phases reality into nightmare, exploring mothers' relationships to sons, women's relationships to men, beauty's relationship to evil. Blending biting humour with brilliant perceptions of the levels of despair, "The Butterfly Plague" presents the movie world in all its splendour and decay.
Now an important title in the newly redesigned PerennialCanada series, Timothy Findley’s The Piano Man’s Daughter continues to be one of his most popular books ever. The novel’s reissue follows on the heels of Findley’s newest novel,Pilgrim, released in late 1999 and sure to attract even more new readers to the Findley fold. A glorious reverberation of a time when change was reaching a crescendo and yet hope and renewal were always to be found, The Piano Man’s Daughter is the story of Lily Kilworth and her son Charlie, a young piano tuner, who must find answers to the questions that define his life. Who was his father? And, given the swirl of madness enveloping his mother, does he dare become a father himself? Set at the turn of the century and inspired by the history of Findley’s own mother’s family, this is a remarkable novel that sings with love and loss, a wonderful burst of reading pleasure.
It all starts when Lilah Kemp - librarian, spiritualist, schizophrenic - inadvertantly lets Kurtz out of page 92 of Heart of Darkness and is unable to get him back in.While Kurtz is stalking the streets of Toronto, Lilah frantically begins her search for Marlow to help her deal with the literary villain Meanwhile, the city is becoming increasingly chaotic and terrifying. The rich and powerful are engaged in a web of depravity, a new and horrifying disease called sturnusemia has swept the city, and severly traumatized children are turning up at the local psychiatric institutes. Kurtz seems to be at the centre of it all. Lilah, witness to events tearing the very fabric of her society, seeks solace as always in the great works of literature and prays for Marlow to find an capture Kurtz - before it's too late.
The Body is that of Calder Maddox, who owned half the world and rented the other half. The Sleuth is Nessa Van Horne, whose photos of the beach on the day of the murder may obscure more than they reveal. The Suspects are the many people who spend their summers at the beautiful Aurora Sands Hotel. Could it be Lily, Calder’s diaphanous mistress? Or Nigel, the perfect civil servant? Or the disappearing chauffeur? Or the mysterious doctor who appears from nowhere?
'Pilgrim', is the story of a man who cannot die. Ageless, sexless, deathless and timeless, 'Pilgrim' has inhabited endless lives and times. On April 15, 1912 - ironically, the date of the sinking of the Titanic - 'Pilgrim' fails, once again, to commit suicide, his heart miraculously beginning again, five hours after he is found hanging from a tree. Admitted to the Burgholzi Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, by his dear friend Lady Sybil Quartermaine, Pilgrim - at first, stubbornly mute - begins a battle of psyche and soul with Carl Jung, self-professed mystical scientist of the unconscious and slave to his own sexual appetites. Poring over Pilgrim's journals in his quest to penetrate his patient's armour of silence, Jung is both confounded and shaken by the extraordinary revelations of other existences. 'Pilgrim' is a richly-layered story of a man's search for his own destiny - superbly crafted, breathtaking in scope and brilliantly imagined.
Spadework was Timothy Findley’s final novel before his death in June 2002. An electric word play of infidelity and morality, it is fitting that the novel is set in Stratford, the town where Findley began his career as an actor. Now in a Perennial Canada edition, Spadework will join Findley’s wonderful body of work, a collection to be enjoyed again and again.Known for his gift in plumbing the depths of the human condition, Findley digs deep in Spadework with a cast of characters, each one motivated by addictions and ambitions, each one very alone. Set in the steamy summer of 1998, events such as the Lewinsky scandal, a hostage-taking in Peru and a severed phone line connect—and disconnect—a story singed by lust, power, adultery and ambition. A bestseller in cloth and a smash hit in mass market, Spadework ’s Perennial edition will appeal to Findley’s legion of literary fans.
