The Englishman's Boy - Paperback

by Guy Vanderhaeghe (Author)

From the national bestselling author of The Last Crossing, a story that's "by turns a western, a critique of Hollywood, and a novel of ideas" (The New York Times Book Review).

In 1920s Hollywood, elusive producer Damon Ira Chance is obsessed with making movies rooted in American history and experience. So after discovering that small-time actor Shorty McAdoo is a real-life cowboy-and is even rumored to have played a role in the Cypress Hills Massacre--Chance commissions ambitious young screenwriter Harry Vincent to find Shorty and retell his story.

But as Harry digs deeper into Shorty's life, he uncovers a surprising tale of survival, power, greed, and the seduction of dreams . . . all with an ending that no one is prepared for.

"A wonderful writer . . . The Englishman's Boy is a great accomplishment."--Richard Ford

"An epic tale that brings together the American West before the turn of the century with the Hollywood of the 1920s."--Los Angeles Times

"Fascinating . . . Vanderhaeghe seamlessly alternates two interconnected stories. . . . Masterful storytelling."--Entertainment Weekly

"A compelling yarn that delivers provocative intellectual content about the ways our tendency to mythologize history can prevent us from learning its lessons."--San Francisco Chronicle

Front Jacket

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.

Author Biography

Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Saskatchewan in 1951. He is the author of six books of fiction. His last novel, The Englishman's Boy (1996), was a longtime national bestseller in Canada and won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Vanderhaeghe is a visiting professor of English at S.T.M. College in Saskatchewan, Canada.