Lucas, a musician and translator, comes home one day to find a cryptic postcard on his doorstep. This postcard sets in motion a series of bizarre, seemingly interconnected events, leading Lucas and his girlfriend, Nuria, to be kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth century. Seeking guidance from a fire-eater, a band of mythic roof-dwellers, and his deeply skeptical friends, Lucas must figure out who to believe-or who can believe him. In his internationally acclaimed debut, Richard Gwyn takes us on a gripping ride of faith and deceit through Barcelona's Gothic Quarter.

The Color of a Dog Running Away

Literature & Fiction

Gwyn, Richard

Literary

Anchor

Lucas, a musician and translator living in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, comes home one day to find a cryptic invitation to a local art gallery slipped under his door. When he appears at the appointed time, he sets in motion a series of improbable, seemingly interconnected events that disrupt his previously passive existence. He meets the alluring Nuria and they begin an intense love affair. He is approached by a band of Barcelona’s mythic roof dwellers and has a run-in with a fire-eating prophet. But when he and Nuria are kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth century, Lucas realizes that his life is spinning out of control. The cult’s megalomaniac leader, Ponteuf, maintains that Nuria and Lucas are essential to his plan to revive the religion. While Nuria is surprisingly open to Ponteuf and his theories, Lucas is outraged and makes his escape. Back in Barcelona, Lucas wanders the streets in a drug-and-alcohol-induced haze, pining for Nuria and struggling to make sense of what happened to him. He recounts his improbable adventures to his friends, who are wholly entertained by the story and deeply doubtful of its truth, a skepticism that is exacerbated by Lucas’s tendency to use the third person and flaunt different narrative styles. A love story, tale of adventure, historical thriller, and evocative tour of Barcelona, THE COLOR OF A DOG RUNNING AWAY is a dazzling blend of the surreal and the ordinary, a novel that beguiles and disturbs in equal measure.

The Color of A Dog Running Away

DOUBLEDAY

Communicating Health and Illness

In this book Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people. Communicating Health and Illness: · Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness · Surveys media representations of health and illness · Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness · Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine

Parenting & Relationships

Sage Publications Ltd.

49th Paradox

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live without a liver transplant. A novelist and poet, he lost nine years of his life as a vagrant alcoholic roaming the Mediterranean. This memoir is an account of his ""lost"" years: of addiction and reckless travel, serial hospitalizations, living under sentence of death, the life-saving gift of a hepatic graft, recovery, and at last, redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love, and fatherhood.

The Vagabond's Breakfast

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Alcemi

Seldom has there been a political leader so complex, so impossible to predict, so difficult to understand, so private and yet so public, as Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979, and again from 1980 to 1984.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau (The Canadians)

Children's Books

Biographies

Fitzhenry and Whiteside

Beautifully packaged with wood block illustrations, this collection of Psalms is presented in the ancient Japanese form of haiku poetry. Here are praises to a spiritual power presented in a stark and clear fashion. These readings will challenge those familiar with the Psalms to look for new meaning while introducing these prayers to a whole new audience.

Psalms in Haiku: Meditative Songs of Prayer

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Ulysses Pr

The extraordinary life of Joey Smallwood is the stuff of fictionliterally: Wayne Johnston’s acclaimed novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, draws heavily on this definitive biography. And no wonder! Set against a colorful background in stirring times it has, as its hero, a character whose career defied both convention and the odds. A one time pig farmer and ardent socialist-turned-union-buster Smallwood is best remembered as the man responsible for bringing Newfoundland into confederation with Canada. A full ten years before Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states of the union a massive British Dominion on the Eastern Seaboard was at a crossroads. Should they join the US as its 49th state? Maintain ties with the British via a British-led commission of government? Should they join Canada? Joey Smallwood, a well-known radio personality, writer and organizer at the time, led a spirited campaign in favor of joining Canada. With 52.3% of a controversial vote marred by sectarian tensions Newfoundlanders voted with Smallwood and the boundaries of Canada as we know them today were established. The first premier of Newfoundland, Smallwood ran Newfoundland virtually unchallenged for 23 years. Smallwood’s work experience was checkered, at best, but included stints as a contributor to socialist newspapers in New York and London. He was self-taught, and possessed the enthusiasm and wrong-headedness of the autodidact. As Gwyn shows, however, Smallwood possessed ambition of a rare order and utterly unconquerable self-confidence. These qualities combined with unerring political instinct enabled Smallwood to drag a reluctant Newfoundland into union with Canada, and subsequently to impose his will over compliant colleagues and a vestigial opposition until he governed his island province with the near-absolute power of a despot. Like a despot, too, he countenanced corruption on a scale rarely equaled in Canada. His fall, no less than his rise to power, contains elements of pathos, farce, and pure, farfetched wonderfulness. Richard Gwyn interviewed Smallwood extensively and enjoyed his subject’s full co-operation. But this is in no sense an authorized biography. It is a balanced, informed, and deeply considered life of a unique political figure. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary

Historical

Skyhorse

Set in the bohemian under-belly of Barcelona, this novel skilfully combines an urban thriller and a gothic historical drama focusing on Catharism, a 13th century heretical sect.

The Colour of a Dog Running Away

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Parthian Books

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

Books by Gwyn, Richard