Books by Douglas Glover

Meet Precious ? a burned-out, boozy journalist-cum-amateur-sleuth with an embarrassing nickname. He's the hero of Douglas Glover's hilariously suspenseful first novel. A brilliant send-up of the murder mystery genre, Precious was a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1984 and sold out its first and only print run in just one month. Now, mystery lovers and fans of Glover's later fiction can enjoy this witty post-modern detective tale, which The Globe and Mail called ?a jolly Canadian extravaganza.? After three failed marriages and a stint in a Greek jail, Precious Elliott is ready for Dullsville. A job as woman's page editor for the Ockenden Star-Leader seems like just the ticket ?that is, until Rose Oxley, the town gossip, winds up dead with a pair of scissors lodged in her chest. Inviting comparisons with the work of Ross Macdonald and Jasper Fforde, Precious deftly combines a satisfying mystery plot with an ingenious literary parody.

Meet Tully Stamper, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, and a tippler of corn juice. He is also a modern-day knight errant and one of the world's last innocents. In this hilarious yet bittersweet tale, Tully staggers out of the Florida swamp and into Gomez Gap, a sliver of the Old South turned Hollywood backdrop. From the moment he stumbles into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her flamboyant film-director husband, Otto Osterwalder, we become Tully's co-conspirators, sharing his pain, his optimism, and his wayward wit.

16 Categories of Desire maps the human heart in all its passion, valour, ineptitude, and vulnerability. These eleven stories are populated by scientists and eccentrics, writers and wastrels, all looking fervently for love in its many guises. Some long for the unattainable; others struggle with the compulsion to destroy love before it�s taken from them. Occasionally scabrous, horrifically funny, intermittently appalling, and wildly erotic, the stories in 16 Categories of Desire bring to life a world in which a screen of irony may be the only defence against fear and loneliness.

Hendrick Nellis is a Tory guerrilla at the Niagara frontier at the end of the American Revolution; he is also a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. He kidnaps his own son, Oskar, for King George's army, and it is Oskar, haunted by dreams, who tells this ambivalent tale of war and redemption. The violent, erotic, and partly true story of The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the psychic no-man's-land where the delirium of combat drives human nature into a primal frenzy.

Fast on the heels of his widely acclaimed comic novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover has produced a stunning volume of stories which breaks all the fictional moulds. In this new collection, Glover introduces an astonishing array of characters who inhabit a world which is wayward yet full of marvels, from an 18th-century pioneer who believes he is being persecuted by witches to a born-again Christian from Kentucky who loses his memory and ends up finding true love in glitzy Bel Air. Whether contemplating the mystic Worm of Ouroboros or the colours of Alabama's Gulf coast, he infuses his writing with energy, exuberant imagery and amazing turns of thought.

A practical and illuminating collection of essays on writing and reading fiction, focusing on the relationship between form and theme.