The Last Crossing » (Bargain)

GUY VANDERHAEGHE was born in Saskatchewan in 1951. He is the author of six books of fiction including The Englishman's Boy, a long-time national bestseller in Canada that won the Governor's General Award and was short-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize. Vanderhaeghe is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College in Saskatchewan, Canada.

This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key area in American History, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Charles and Addington are two brothers sent from the comforts of Victorian England by their dictatorial father to find Simon, a brother missing somewhere in the depths of the American West. As Charles, a sensitive painter, and Addington, an arrogant former Soldier, search the American frontier, they gather a troupe of other characters--Lucy, bent on avenging her sister's death, Custis, a Civil War veteran, and Jerry Potts, a half-breed. The love story that emerges eventually forces Charles to confront the meaning of love--and what it means to cross over.

The New York Times

The stories, for example, of John Rowand of the Hudson's Bay Company and ''Rowand's Folly'' (his three-story log house, with a gallery and an immense ballroom), of Rowand's bizarre funeral procession back and forth across the Atlantic, his corpse pickled in rum, and of the voyageurs who drank the rum along the way, have little to do with the novel's careful interlocking of narrative pieces but everything to do with a baroque love of history and its freakish incongruities. So we get both a tour guide and a parody of tour guides in the padded-with-arcana middle portion of the book. Epic novels can be loose, baggy monsters, but this one is stuffed with enough goodies to keep us entertained for days. —John Vernon