The Deptford Trilogy

Gathering in one volume Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders, The Deptford Trilogy collects three novels about the lives of three men from a small Ontario town who are bound and transformed by a jarring memory from their childhood. From the wayward path of a maliciously thrown snowball crumbles all sorts of issues that take a lifetime to iron out, from the dementia-suffering child of a premature birth to the guilt-ridden life of the snowball thrower. All three involved are somehow haunted - one to death - by this accident. It is a testament to Robertson Davies' power as a writer that he can so eerily depict the exponentially grave aftermath of an otherwise minute moment.