This is vintage Findley, who similarly re-imagined the Old Testament story of Noah and the Flood in Not Wanted on the Voyage. Headhunter is another example of Findley's ability to blend morality and entertainment. Findley's willingness to blend literature and pulp is Headhunter's greatest asset. You can get lost in the rollicking good fun of the sci-fi dystopia or you can dredge its depths for literary clues. Or you can do both. Either way, Headhunter lives up to both its best-seller and literary status. --Jonathan Dewar

Findley's career as a professional actor is nowhere more present than in this fascinating novel of revelatory props, coded dialogue, and emblematic settings. Mauberley's participation in an international cabal of intelligentsia and power brokers also lends Famous Last Words the suspense of an espionage novel. This fictional group, devoted to creating a new, post-national Europe, anticipates the migrant fixations of so many of Findley's fellow Canadian novelists. Like the characters of Mordecai Richler, Rohinton Mistry, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Mavis Gallant, Findley's Mauberley is, in Michael Ondaatje's phrase, another "international bastard--born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives." --Darryl Whetter

In Spadework, Timothy Findley, master storyteller and playwright, has created an electric wordplay of infidelity and morality set on the stage of Canada's preeminent theater town. In this fictional portrait, intrigue, passion, and ambition are always waiting in the wings. Findley peoples the town with theater folk, artists, writers, and visitors (both welcome and unwelcome), and with lives that are immediately recognizable as "Findley-esque" -- the lonely, the dispossessed, and the sexually troubled.

A story that ripples with ever-widening repercussions, a sensual, witty, and completely absorbing novel, Spadework is another Timothy Findley winner.

There are other fine tales in Story of a Nation that don't touch on love at all—Niedzviecki's "Very Nice, Very Nice" combines two of the author's obsessions, filmmaker Arthur Lipsett and Toronto commune Rochdale. And Thomas King's "Where the Borg Are" tells of a young Native boy's attempts to understand government aboriginal policy in terms of Star Trek. Not all of the stories are as successful as these are, but more often than not this beautifully designed, heavily illustrated book finds the perfect pitch between the cold facts of history and the yearnings of the human heart. --Shawn Conner