Englishman’s Boy Books In Order
- The Englishman’s Boy (1996)
- The Last Crossing (2002)
- A Good Man (2011)
Novels
- My Present Age (1985)
- Homesick (1989)
- August into Winter (2021)
Collections
- Man Descending (1982)
- The Trouble With Heroes and Other Stories (1983)
- Things as They Are? (1992)
- Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (2015)
Chapbooks
- Dancock’s Dance (1996)
Plays
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Guy Vanderhaeghe Books Overview
The Englishman’s Boy
Originally published in 1996, The Englishman’s Boy is the first in a Guy Vanderhaeghe trilogy that includes the nationally best selling novel The Last Crossing, with the third book due to be published next year. By far his most successful book in his native Canada, The Englishman s Boy expertly depicts an American West where greed and deception act side by side with honor and strength. In 1920s Hollywood, elusive movie studio owner Damon Ira Chance is obsessed with making pictures rooted in American history and experience, with the poetry of fact. So when he discovers that one of the most popular bit players in the Westerns is a real life tin god the last buffalo of the old West, Shorty McAdoo he commissions an ambitious young screenwriter named Harry Vincent to hunt Shorty down and retell his story. Richly textured and evocative, this is an unforgettable story about power, greed, and the pull of dreams. At once an intensely original character study and a hugely entertaining page turner, The Englishman s Boy is a gritty, resonant novel of timeless beauty and insight.
The Last Crossing
A novel of ruggedness and salvation, an epic masterpiece set in a time when worlds collided, were destroyed, and were built anew A 1 best seller in Canada and winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Fiction Book of the Year Award, The Last Crossing is a sweeping tale of breathtaking quests, adventurous detours, and hard won redemption. Master storyteller Guy Vanderhaeghe hailed by Richard Ford as ‘simply a wonderful writer’ takes us on an exhilarating journey from the ivy covered towers of Oxford in Victorian England to the dusty whiskey trading posts of the nineteenth century American and Canadian West. Englishmen Charles and Addington Gaunt are ordered by their tyrannical industrialist father to find their brother Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. Charles, a disillusioned artist, and Addington, a disgraced military captain, set off to Fort Benton in America and enlist the services of a guide to lead them north, where Simon was last seen. The brothers hire the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scot, who suffers from his own painful past. At Addington s command, the party grows to include Caleb Ayto, a sycophantic American journalist, who is to record the journey for posterity; Lucy Stoveall, a fiery and beautiful woman who is bent on finding the men who viciously killed her sister; Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran in love with Lucy; and saloon keeper Aloysius Dooley. This unlikely posse, now encumbered with both psychological baggage and wagon trains, becomes entangled in an unfolding drama that forces each to come to terms with his o! r her own demons. Told from alternating points of view and in vivid flashbacks, The Last Crossing conveys the varied lives of its search party in haunting scenes a bear hunt at dawn, the discovery of an Indian village decimated by smallpox, a sharpshooter s devastating annihilation of his prey, a soldier s guilt ridden memory of his own survival, and an atypical love story.
A Good Man
In the ambitious and masterful final novel of his bestselling trilogy, Guy Vanderhaeghe, returns to the nineteenth century Canadian and American West to explore the final days of one of the world’s last great frontiers. Wesley Case is a former soldier and son of a Canadian lumber baron who sets out into the untamed borderlands between Canada and the United States to escape a dark secret from his past. He settles in Montana where he hopes to buy a cattle ranch, and where he begins work as a liaison between the American and Canadian militaries in an effort to contain the Native Americans unresolved anger in the wake of the Civil War. Amidst the brutal violence that erupts between the Sioux warriors and U.S. forces, Case s plan for a quiet ranch life is further compromised by an unexpected dilemma: he falls in love with the beautiful, outspoken, and recently widowed Ada Tarr. It s a budding romance that soon inflames the jealousy of Ada s quiet and deeply disturbed admirer, Michael Dunne. When the American government unleashes its final assault on the Indians, Dunne commences his own vicious plan for vengeance in one last feverish attempt to claim Ada as his own.
Things as They Are?
By The Award Winning Author Of The Last Crossing And The Englishman’s BoyDeftly 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.
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