Book Description
By The Award-Winning Author Of The Last Crossing And The Englishman’s Boy

Deftly layered, humane, these stories brilliantly capture the pathos and comedy of the human condition. Following the death of his domineering father, a middle-aged man tries to uncover a truth about their sometimes difficult relationship. When a grade-six teacher tyrannizes a student without apparent reason, the boy learns an unexpected lesson and his young life is changed irrevocably. An elderly widow falls prey to a con artist, revealing what we are capable of sacrificing to appease what we dread the most. A twelve-year-old boy is shunted off to his grandmother’s farm and becomes part of an adult world he scarcely understands. A group of high-school students play on a classmate’s self-delusions and set up what promises to be the most loaded boxing match ever staged. Whether writing from the point of view of a child, an adolescent, or a man in his seventies, Guy Vanderhaeghe takes us into the lives of his characters with razor-sharp insights laced with gentle humour.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Captivating stories
Guy Vanderhaege's characters voices live on in my head after reading this book. I still chuckle at the heated conversation between an old, proud man and a young punk wearing the fashion of the pants hanging down.
Each story captures the drama and the pain of life, from youth to old age. Guy knows how to buid up the scene and then break your heart with such bitter sweetness.
One minute you are laughing and the next you are holding your breath at the pain or pathos.
There are brilliant descriptions. My favourite was of the teacher who looked like Sitting Bull with a perm.
I did not want to finish reading such a crafted collection.

Saskatchewaners
Guy Vanderhaeghe's short stories are better than his novels, and this collection is the best of them.Quiet as a shady grove, this collection follows on Sinclair Ross' tone, and is marginally less depressing. ... Read more

Book Description
It is the summer of 1959, and in a prairie town in Saskatchewan, Alec Monkman waits for his estranged daughter to come home, with the grandson he has never seen. But this is an uneasy reunion. Fiercely independent, Vera has been on her own since running away at nineteen – first to the army, and then to Toronto. Now, for the sake of her young son, she must swallow her pride and return home after seventeen years. As the story gradually unfolds, the past confronts the present in unexpected ways as the silence surrounding Vera’s brother is finally shattered and the truth behind Vera’s long absence revealed.With its tenderness, humour, and vivid evocation of character and place, Homesick confirms Guy Vanderhaeghe’s reputation as one of Canada’s most engaging and accomplished storytellers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Please read this book...
Without going into the actual storyline too deeply, I will only say that this book is beautiful and sad and I think accurately portrays the conflicting feelings of people who love and resent their family members. The main character in the book is Vera, who has left her father and disabled brother in Saskatchewan to forge a new life for herself in Toronto and ends up returning feeling not quite defeated but definitely weathered. Her relationships with her son and her aging father are complicated and recognizable and the ending was surprising as the past comes back at first to hurt and then to heal. I grew up in Saskatchewan and many familiar characters of the small town are present in the story...it is worth reading if for no other reason than to visit the prairie landscape, but the characters will pull you in as well.

One of Canada's Best
The story is a model of conflict between generations.Vera, the protagonist, headstrong daughter, wonderful mother, seargant!, good wife can be admired and detested, depending on the scene.But she is one of thegreat characters of Canadian fiction. Alec, the grandfather, will be mainlydisliked for his habits and assumptions about women, but he can beunderstood as well. Daniel, son and grandson, will be liked by almost all,even though he has no outstanding "manly" qualities, he loves hisgrandfather, and is loyal to the end. Characterization marks great fiction. Here it is. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (23)

BORING
By far the boringest most pointless book I've ever read in my life. I seriously don't see how it won this award and I seriously don't see a life in anybody who would bother to read past the first chapter of this pointless novel.

impossible to put down
Guy Vanderhaeghe has crafted a masterful novel about the Canadian WIld West and 1920s Hollywood which starts as a riveting thriller and turns into a meditation on quetions of identity (personal and national), the role of memory in historical reconstruction, and the value (or is it futility?) of remembering and retelling the past.

The book tells two stories.In one, the Swan Hills Massacre looms as Caandian settlers head out into the West, following "horse thieves."Among them is the Englishman, from the point of view of whose servant-- the Boy, Shorty McAdoo-- the action unfolds.The other story tells of Damon Ira LaChance, Hollywood mogul, who wants to make an epic D.W. Griffiths-inspired Western.La Chance's producer seeks out the reticent McAdoo and the narative alternates between the Hollywood and Wild West stories.

ALthought the characters remain opaque, Vanderhaghe is on sure fictional footing here.One of the novel's points is that history ironically becomes less knowable the more it is interpreted.The horror of the events that McAdoo will witness is both the subject of LaChance's film and the simple fact that makes it necessary for the film to "misintepret" the events it portrays.So it is with the characters:we see actions and words, but motivations are strangely absent, as is interior character development.It is as if the narrator knows that his own story is a re-creation (and not recreation) whose limits-- a hundred and twenty years after the "fact"-- are acknowledged in his refusal to make up yet ANOTHER story about the men's interior lives.Perhaps, as some have suggested, this is the flaw in Vanderhaeghe's novel; perhaps it is his subtle nod to the Hollywood tradition within which the novel must work.

The book is an edge of the seat thriller, a philosophical question-poser, and often oddly beautiful, its nostalgia shot through with a bitter self-consciousness.Like all great Westerns (Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch,The Shooting, The Great Northfield Minnesota Gang, High Noon), The Englishman's Boys is about the death of the imagined West and, sadly, the death of the real, complex but strangely opaque people who once lived there.

The best book ever written!
Guy is my cousin and I am very proud to say that. This is the best book that I have ever read and for those of you who say it sucks because it is confusing, clearly you are just uneducated and you don't deserve to read this book.

Why you should go to Canada
When I occasionally get to Canada, I always search out the bookstores, as you can find great Canadian novels like this one that are practically unknown in the US. The characters andstorylines in this novel ring historically true and are at the same time unique.The book intriguingly weaves together the not so familiar old West of Canada (at least to readers in the US) with prohibition-era Hollywood.The writing is plain, direct, and superb. This is great literature with important things to say, delivered in the form of a compelling and engrossing story.

SUCKS
By far the dumbest, most confusing novel I have ever read. We read it in our Contemporary fiction class in College and we are now trying to get them to change the curriculm so we are never forced to read such rubbish again. ... Read more

Amazon.com
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, Amazon.ca Book Description
This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key area in American History, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Charles and Addington are two brothers sent from the comforts of Victorian England by their dictatorial father to find Simon, a brother missing somewhere in the depths of the American West. As Charles, a sensitive painter, and Addington, an arrogant former Soldier, search the American frontier, they gather a troupe of other characters--Lucy, bent on avenging her sister's death, Custis, a Civil War veteran, and Jerry Potts, a half-breed. The love story that emerges eventually forces Charles to confront the meaning of love--and what it means to cross over. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (38)

Too intense for me
I'll admit up front that I only read the first 50 pages, but I just couldn't keep reading it because of its graphic nature.I think the author is highly intelligent, and I have a hunch the book is masterfully crafted, I've heard nothing but great comments about his talent.So this review is by no means a fully-informed one.I just wanted to tag a warning for those people who enjoy a well-written book minus the shock value.I figured if I couldn't get through 50 pages without detailed sex, murder and rape, it wasn't worth it to keep going.

The Gaunts Put the 'Dis' in Dysfunctional
Young Englishman Simon Gaunt, religious zealot, has gone missing in the Old American West (specifically Canada). Dear old dad Henry, the overbearing so-and-so, sends older brother Addington and Simon's twin Charles in search. These folks put the `dis' in a dysfunctional family. Addington, a self-centered martinet, loves only himself and his pleasures and timid Charles, an aspiring artist, seems not to know what he wants. They hire Jerry Potts, a real-life Canadian frontiersman (Vanderhaeghe is Canadian) to help find Simon and meet up with a collection of society's castoffs and loose ends and form an odd posse.

To some readers, calling this book Western literature might be a put off or a putdown - I happen to love Western writing (A.B. Guthrie and Larry McMurtry to name two) - so let's just call it literature set in the Old West. Vanderhaeghe is a tremendously talented writer.

Highly recommended for fans of Western literature or just fine writing of any kind.

Great read. Definitely recommended
Richly painted and diverse characters fill a story highlighting American and Canadian Western Frontier history. A nearly boiling-over melting pot of Englishmen, Scots, Americans, Native Americans, men and women, and mixes in between. Wonderful writing style that moves along at a great pace while spending time diving deep into the people and places that make up the tale.

Won't Find Better Writing
You won't be able to find any better writing than this.Frequently I had to stop just to admire the wordsmithing I had just encountered.Mr. Vanderhaeghe has an unparelleled ability to use metaphors, similes and simple words to describe something so vividly that you think you are looking at the object rather than a page in abook.

The story line is a young, idealistic Englishman gets lost in America.At the urging of their tyrannical father his two brothers search Montana and into Canada for him.Along the way they are joined by a Civil War veteran and a woman who are key players and a few ancillary characters.There are interactions with Indians throughout, but not of the cowboy and Indian type.

The tale is spun by the characters themselves, flashing from one to another.Occasionally a third person narrative is interjected to move the plot along.The author gets the different voices of the characters well so it is easy to maintain the identity of the speaker.

The historical context and relations with the Indians of the area are captured well.There is a love triangle and a character or two going over the edge.Sibling rivalries and love are explored deeply.

In addition to the fine writing, the author is terrific at developing the characters.Early on, the reader feels that he knows all of them, which always adds to a book.The dialogue between them is colorful and believeable.Often in a book such as this the first person narratives do not work because the author embues the speaker with too much knowledge or intelligence to be believable.Mr. Vanderhaege does not fall into the trap.The thoughts of each are credible and fit their personalities.

My only criticism of the book is that there are a few slow spots that are long enough to detract from the story line and the book as a whole.Even in the areas that are not so well paced, however, the writing continues to be absolutely wonderful.If there were half stars this would be be four and one half.

This is strongly recommended for the writing first, the characters second and the story line third.

An interesting Mix
Historical fiction with a modern eye overseeing all. Learned about some new people, but the pacing left a lot to be desired. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from American Review of Canadian Studies, published by Association for Canadian Studies in the United States on December 22, 2001. The length of the article is 4772 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Narrative geography in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy.(Critical Essay)
Author: Patricia Linton
Publication: American Review of Canadian Studies (Refereed)
Date: December 22, 2001
Publisher: Association for Canadian Studies in the United States
Volume: 31Issue: 4Page: 611(12)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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Book Description
Word count: 1800. ... Read more

Book Description
The Englishman’s 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. Vanderhaeghe’s 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 Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one. ... Read more

Book Description
These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life’s joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant first book of fiction. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2005. The length of the article is 916 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: History and fiction.(Guest Commentary/Commentaire de l'invite)
Author: Guy Vanderhaeghe
Publication: Canadian Journal of History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 40Issue: 3Page: 429(2)

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