Synopses & Reviews
The Englishmans Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West - the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghes rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era - with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers - provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter - “the Englishmans boy” - whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels,
My Present Age (1984),
Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award,
The Englishmans Boy (1996), winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently,
The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is also the author of three collections of short stories,
Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governors Generals Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., and
The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and
Things As They Are (1992).
Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancocks Dance, was produced in 1995.
Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.
From the Hardcover edition.