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Also by Richard B. Wright

Clara Callan

It’s the middle of the Great Depression, and Clara Callan is a spinsterish school teacher whose quiet life in a small Ontario town masks a passion for love and adventure. Nora, her flighty and very pretty sister, travels to New York, where she lands a starring role in a radio soap opera.

Written in diary and letter form, and with Richard B. Wright’s extraordinary eye for telling detail, Clara Callan brings the sisters and their world vividly to life. It was an era when show business was in its infancy, the Dionnes grabbed the headlines and the Women’s Auxiliary still ruled the social roost in small towns everywhere. Pre-divorce, pre-Pill, pre-liberation, this is a world in which judgement weighs heavily on anyone who defies convention.

“Superb.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A singularly poignant story about the depravity of human beings [and] their compassion and amazing capacity to endure.”

—Times Literary Supplement (London)

The Age of Longing

Set in small-town Ontario and spanning three generations, Richard B. Wright’s acclaimed novel of Howard Wheeler’s search for self-understanding is a journey through the past, both real and imagined, a brilliant gathering-together of the many threads of emotional inheritance that make up a life.

“Written with such poise and grace that readers probably won’t notice till the last page that some of the characters closely resemble themselves.”

—Robert Fulford

The Weekend Man

First published in 1970, The Weekend Man immediately established Richard B. Wright as a fresh and powerful new voice in North American fiction. A textbook publishing salesman whose life seems continually poised on the verge of free-fall, thirty-year-old Wes Wakeham waffles between fighting the sad nostalgia of his past and the certain failure of his future. Shot through with the ironies of urban life, love and lust, The Weekend Man is as relevant in the 90s as it was in the 70s.

“Mr. Wright writes with the apparent ease of breathing, and he is both touching and very, very funny.”

—The New York Times

Final Things

Twelve-year-old Jonathan Farris leaves his father’s apartment one Saturday afternoon and never returns. The next day police discover that Jonathan has been brutally raped and murdered. Charlie, Jonathan’s father, already on a downward slide from a nasty divorce, a stalled writing career and a creeping alcohol addiction, struggles to cope with the most devastating loss a parent can ever endure. When an anonymous phone call offers him information about his son’s killer, Charlie is galvanized into action, channelling his grief, his guilt and his rage into one of the most powerful confrontations since James Dickey’s Deliverance.

“A tautly written story.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Teacher’s Daughter

High-school English teacher Jan Harper lives in the basement of her mother’s suburban home. At thirty-six, Jan worries that she’s on the brink of wearing heavy walking shoes and retreating farther into her single, somewhat solitary existence. She’s just come off a failed affair with a married man, discovering she wasn’t the first mistress in his life. The only prospect for a relationship comes in the dull grey form of Bruce, a fellow teacher. So it’s a complete surprise to Jan when a darkly handsome man insists on stepping into her tidy suburban world. James is younger, unemployed, has a prison record and a passion for his Trans-Am. He also has a passion for Jan. There’s something about James that both charms and repels her—an unpredictability that’s about to shatter both their lives.

“Handled with astonishing and unobtrusive deftness…. Wright tells this simple story with a narrative technique under perfect control.”

—Books in Canada

Farthing’s Fortunes

This comical, picaresque tale follows the travels and fortunes of Bill Farthing at the turn of the 20th century. Seduced at fifteen by his amorous guardian, and fleeing rural Canada for a life of adventure, Farthing joins up with the irrepressible Cass Findlater, perhaps one of the last great American entrepreneurs.

But he is also on a quest, a search for the love of his life—a red-headed music hall beauty named Sally Butters. It is a search that takes him to the bustling, immigrant-filled New York City of the 1890s; to the Klondike Gold Rush; to Europe, where he runs into the “war to end all wars”; and to the rail yards and hobo jungles of the Great Depression.

“One of the best books of the year.”

—London Free Press

Sunset Manor

Kay Ormsby has finally decided—after accidentally setting her house on fire—that it’s time she moved to Sunset Manor, a home for senior citizens. However, even in her retirement, Miss Ormsby is anything but inactive and she has no intention of going gently into that good night. As the diverse residents cope with their “sunset” years, a story unfolds that both parodies retirement home living and celebrates the spirit and humour of the elderly.

“In this book and its centrepiece, Kay Ormsby, Wright has created images of death and dying that rise a mile above despair. It is a triumph at every level.”

—Timothy Findley

Tourists

This darkly comic novel begins with the end of Philip Bannister’s life of crime. Tracing his way back through the events that led up to a triple murder, Philip draws the reader into his nightmare swirl of worst-case vacation scenarios, complete with impossible new friends, a wanton wife and his own confused perspective on the world—a perspective that will not allow him to extricate himself from the disaster unfolding before him.

“Why mince words? Tourists … is a small comic masterpiece on the moral hazards of foreign travel.”

—Calgary Herald

In the Middle of a Life

Fred Landon is forty-two years old, out of a job, out of a marriage and only tentatively in tune with his role as a father to his seventeen-year-old flower child daughter. Suddenly, his lonely life becomes complicated by the demands of a new job, his ex-wife, his errant daughter and his passionate lover. Fred Landon had been jolted back to the world of the living—but where will his life go now?

“Tender, funny and wise. Like Alice Munro, Richard B. Wright reminds us that the forgotten and apparently unremarkable … have important stories to tell.”

—The Globe and Mail

 

Excerpts from Clara Callan, The Weekend Man and The Age of Longing by Richard B. Wright

From Clara Callan (2001):

Saturday, November 3 (8:10 p.m.)

Nora left for New York City today. I think she is taking a terrible chance going all the way down there but, of course, she wouldn’t listen. You can’t tell Nora anything. You never could. Then came the last-minute jitters. Tears in that huge station among strangers and loudspeaker announcements.

“I’m going to miss you, Clara.”

“Yes. Well, and I’ll miss you too, Nora. Do be careful down there!”

“You think I’m making a mistake, don’t you? I can see it in your face.”

“We’ve talked about this many times, Nora. You know how I feel about all this.”

“You must promise to write.”

“Well, of course, I’ll write.”

The handkerchief, smelling faintly of violets, pressed to an eye. Father used to say that Nora’s entire life was a performance. Perhaps she will make something of herself down there in the radio business, but it’s just as likely she’ll return after Christmas. And then what will she do? I’m sure they won’t take her back at the store. It’s a foolish time to be taking chances like this.

A final wave and a gallant little smile. But she did look pretty and someone on the train will listen. Someone is probably listening at this very moment.

Prayed for solitude on my train home but it was not to be. Through the window I could see the trainman helping Mrs. Webb and Marion up the steps. Then came the sidelong glances of the whole and hale as Marion came down the aisle, holding onto the backs of the seats, swinging her bad foot outward and forward and then, by endeavour and the habit of years, dropping the heavy black boot to the floor. Settled finally into the seat opposite, followed by Mother Webb and her parcels. Routine prying from Mrs. W.

From The Weekend Man (1970):

I am enjoying the work thus far and I like living in Union Place. Actually Union Place is a part of metropolitan Toronto; a large suburb which has wandered east of the city along the lakefront and then northward to meet the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway. It’s much like the environs of any modern city; flat farmland which has been paved over and seeded with trim brick bungalows, small factories and office buildings, service stations and shopping plazas, all of it since 1950. In the last few years they’ve changed the zoning by-laws and now at least three or four dozen high-rise apartment buildings have climbed to the sky. Several more are now a-building and I spend many lunch hours watching the steelworkers crawl about on the girders of a new one at the corner of Mirablee and Napier Avenue. I myself live in one of these towering boxes; on the eighteenth floor of Union Terrace, only six blocks from Winchester House.

I am fortunate to live so close to my place of business; it’s almost unheard of nowadays. It suggests an attractive orderliness to my life but nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact my life these days is in a state of disorder and the phone calls from my wife will bear witness to this. There has been a great flurry of them lately, both at the apartment and here at the office (where I suspect Mrs. Bruner of listening in). Molly is really beside herself and it is difficult to blame her. She hates loose ends and it is a small miracle that she has put up with matters as long as she has.

From The Age of Longing (1995):

When I was three or four years old, I used to look for the Stanley Cup in my mother’s china cabinet. This search arose from perhaps my earliest memory: my father is holding me under one arm while I grip the basin of a drinking fountain in Little Lake Park. With his free hand, my father presses the lever, and looking down I am both astonished and delighted by the cold water gushing from the white mica ball. Around me are the cries and laughter of the bathers and my mother’s voice, insistent and hectoring, the voice of the schoolteacher who is used to issuing instruction or admonition.

“Be careful, Ross! Don’t let his mouth touch that!”

For my mother, polio germs lurked everywhere, but especially in places touched by the lips of strangers. Drinking thirstily, I hear too the voices of children nearby.

“That’s Buddy Wheeler. He played for Montreal and he won the Stanley Cup.”

They are talking about the man who is holding me, my father. And where then was this cup he had won? Why was it not with the other cups in the kitchen cupboard or the china cabinet? Of course, those children got it slightly wrong as most of us do when we hear stories. My father did play four games in the National Hockey League with Montreal. But it was the year after they won the Stanley Cup. And I am referring to a Montreal team that is now only a glimmering memory for a few old people. They were called the Maroons.