The complete volume of Robertson Davies's acclaimed trilogy, featuring
Fifth Business
,
The Manticore
, and
World of Wonders
, with a new foreword by Kelly Link
Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.
Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels. Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic,
THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY
provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where 'the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished'.
This is the third novel in Davies's major work,
The Deptford Trilogy
. This novel tells the life story of the unfortunate boy introduced in
The Fifth Business
, who was spirited away from his Canadian home by one of the members of a traveling side show, the Wanless World of Wonders.