[close] It is by no means clear how much control Yorkshireman Jeremy Davenant has over his own destiny. For one, he's convinced that the blueprint of his future already exists on a page ripped from a random book (an encyclopedia it transpires). Romantic, fatalist, quixotic, he blithely teaches Shakespeare with forged credentials at a Montreal university until a single glimpse of a dark lady sends his life spinning into chaotic mishap and obsession. 'Exuberant and smart, RED-ROSE CHAIN signals the arrival of a new, sophisticated comic author who combines John Irving's inventive virtuosity with Tom Green's contempt for everything stuffy in our culture' NATIONAL POST 'RED-ROSE CHAIN is a wonderfully lively picaresque love story. An artfully spry black-comic campus novel (LUCKY JIM rides again) meets street-wise Bad Boy fiction in a most attractively deft intertextual weaving of seventeenth-century drama and modern urban satire' Valentine Cunningham (Booker Prize judge) 'Moore takes on all the labyrinthian twistings and metaphysical explorations of an Eco or a Borge'' QUILL & QUIRE 'Montreal's answer to Woody Allen' Upath.com 'Take equal measures of Milorad Pavich, Russel Hoban, David Lodge and Guy Vanderhaeghe' VANCOUVER SUN [close]