Solomon Gursky Was Here

Description

'A rich, rude, eccentric saga about the Gursky dynasty that crossbreeds Jewish and Canadian myths and is full of splendid comic detail' - Observer WINNER OF THE 1990 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1990 Since the age of eleven Moses Berger has been obsessed with the Gursky clan, an insanely wealthy, profoundly seductive family of Jewish-Canadian descent. Now a 52-year-old alcoholic boigrapher, Berger is desperately trying to chronicle the stories of their lives, especially that of the mysterious Solomon Gursky, who may or may not have died in a plane crash. A rich, irreverent and exuberant comic masterpiece from the author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St Urbain's Horseman.

Mordecai Richler was an acclaimed Canadian novelist and essayist born in Montreal in 1931. He won the Commonwealth Prize, the Paris Review Humour Prize, was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novels Solomon Gursky Was Here and St. Urbain's Horseman, and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He died in 2001.

The wit, depth and wickedness of this resonant novel suggest a happy synthesis of Dickens, Malcolm Lowry and Philip Roth... This is a very fine work * The Times * A rich, rude, eccentric saga about the Gursky dynasty that crossbreeds Jewish and Canadian myths and is full of splendid comic detail * Observer * Vast, chaotic, vigorously imagined and ambitiously freighted * Independent * A major work of rich complexity * Sunday Telegraph * It is passionate, it has a thickness of living about it, and it is made to blaze every now and then with an uncommonly fine bit of worldly wisdom, memorably delivered out of the side of the mouth * Guardian *