Description

Book Synopsis
The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With m

Trade Review
“If you are the kind of reader who looks for traces of the marvelous and the unexpected in narrative as well as daily life, then soon you will, like me, treasure these novels.”
—Kelly Link

The Deptford Trilogy boldly commingles the extraordinary and the everyday, at times attaining what Davies once called, in talking about melodrama, ‘the compelling immediacy of a dream.’”
—Michael Dirda

Fifth Business Penguin twentiethcentury classics

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    £14.45

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    RRP £17.00 – you save £2.55 (15%)

    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Sat 4 Jul 2026.

    A Paperback / softback by Robertson Davies, Kelly Link, Michael Dirda

    10 in stock


      View other formats and editions of Fifth Business Penguin twentiethcentury classics by Robertson Davies

      Publisher: Penguin Group (NZ)
      Publication Date: 01/01/2001
      ISBN13: 9780141186153, 978-0141186153
      ISBN10: 0141186151

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link

      Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

      For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With m

      Trade Review
      “If you are the kind of reader who looks for traces of the marvelous and the unexpected in narrative as well as daily life, then soon you will, like me, treasure these novels.”
      —Kelly Link

      The Deptford Trilogy boldly commingles the extraordinary and the everyday, at times attaining what Davies once called, in talking about melodrama, ‘the compelling immediacy of a dream.’”
      —Michael Dirda

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