Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who brings to life Bob’s long-harbored sexual fetish. Add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate, and you have Alan Cumyn’s strikingly accomplished novel Losing It. Whether describing an Alzheimer sufferer, a fetishist, a twisted poet, or a young mother whose life is suddenly spinning out of control, Cumyn reveals the eccentric sub-surfaces of our lives. Poignant, gritty, and tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as an irresistible blend of darkness and humor.

Losing It: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Cumyn, Alan

Contemporary

St.Martin's Press

Winner, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award
Shortlisted, Trillium Award
Man of Bone has a thriller's taste for blood, but Alan Cumyn delivers something more: a heart-wrenching portrait of an ordinary Canadian jerked into third-world terrorism. Bill Burridge, his wife and their little son have moved to the "island paradise" of Santa Irene on Bill's first diplomatic posting. At the short-staffed embassy, he is thrown, almost unbriefed, into work he scarcely understands. After less than two weeks, while driving alone on a "safe" highway to an afternoon of badminton in the country, he is snatched by revolutionaries. Against his will, Burridge turns out under torture to be a "man of bone" who can't give up and die. His ignorance and low status make him useless to his captors, but they can't simply let him go. They continue to torture him until, distracted by other battles, they abandon him and his keeper in a mountain village. Suddenly one day helicopters rake the village with gunfire, and the whole situation turns upside down. Alan Cumyn is well known for creating men with tender hearts and iron wills. Bill Burridge, angry at God for making him live, keeps his wits by remembering his and Maryse's courtship and marriage and their life with young Patrick. Although he isolates this part of himself from his torturers, he and his beloved family discover when he returns to Ottawa, barely alive, that "living happily ever after" will be more complex than they could have imagined.

Man of Bone

Literary

Emblem Editions

Burridge Unbound

Genre Fiction

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away.  Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who brings to life Bob’s long-harbored sexual fetish. Add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate, and you have Alan Cumyn’s strikingly accomplished novel Losing It.Whether describing an Alzheimer sufferer, a fetishist, a twisted poet, or a young mother whose life is suddenly spinning out of control, Cumyn reveals the eccentric sub-surfaces of our lives. Poignant, gritty, and tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as an irresistible blend of darkness and humor.

Losing It

Humor & Satire

Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who brings to life Bob’s long-harbored sexual fetish. Add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate, and you have Alan Cumyn’s strikingly accomplished novel Losing It. Whether describing an Alzheimer sufferer, a fetishist, a twisted poet, or a young mother whose life is suddenly spinning out of control, Cumyn reveals the eccentric sub-surfaces of our lives. Poignant, gritty, and tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as an irresistible blend of darkness and humor.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

The Sojourn

While Teachers' College officials argue over him, Rudy Seaborn waits nervously in an antiquated limousine. As he stares through the windows at the strange sights surrounding him, a curious crowd stares back at the foreigner who has come to Laozhou to teach English. Home in Canada a year later, Rudy is still caged by cross-cultural differences as he waits for Li Ming, his banished translator and lover, to arrive. The unrest that explodes in Tiananmen Square grips Rudy in Canada as he waits for Li Ming's visa, waits for a friend's baby to be born, waits and still waits for Li Ming.

Waiting for Li Ming

Goose Lane Editions

GLE Library

In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Alan Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. It is those memories that literally save his life and keep him from a cold grave in a foreign land. Upon his return home to Montreal, Crome seeks the nourishment of body and soul, sometimes impulsively, after years of torture and deprivation. He meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. To her they are obscenities and provoke the bitter taste of jealousy. The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn's most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man's hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing.

The Famished Lover

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cumyn, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cumyn, Alan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cumyn, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Losing It: A Novel

Man of Bone

Burridge Unbound

Losing It

Losing It

The Sojourn

Waiting for Li Ming

Man of Bone

Man of Bone

The Famished Lover