The Famished LoverA heart held captive, a world on the edge of war . . .

In the Famished Lover critically acclaimed author Alan Cumyn has created Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite comes home from the First World War. Burning with an intense appetite for beauty, for human contact, for life and love, Ramsay stumbles into a troubled marriage just as the gears of history are aligning for depression and more war. In a moment of optimism Ramsay marries Lillian, a beautiful farm girl from the Eastern Townships south of Montreal. But too soon he is faced with the daunting task of trying to support a family as a commercial artist in the midst of economic chaos. The lingering ghosts of his captivity in a prisoner-of-war camp haunt him as does his idealized memory of Margaret, the woman left behind when Ramsay originally went into battle, but whose imprint on his psyche will never be erased. Ramsey and Lillian exist, for a while, in a state of frozen matrimony, dogged by his history and her inexperience. He wins a job as a pin-up artist when most of his contemporaries are walking the streets. Yet, even when he is winning, Ramsey is also captive. When a passionate affair nearly unhinges him, the fragile truce of his love life seems ready to explode just as Europe is on the verge of sliding into war once again.

"The Famished Lover is a compact, well-written and highly entertaining novel. For all the hand-wringing that has gone on of late in the Canadian press about the historical novel being an exhausted and outworn genre, the book demonstrates the continued vitality of the form, the particular manner in which the novelistic imagination is able to seize upon a particle of the remote past and turn it into something mesmerizing and deeply affecting, and also surprisingly contemporary."

--Steven Hayward, Literary Review of Canada

"Cumyn is an accomplished writer and The Famished Lover is both a complex and compelling read. It is also that rare thing - a sequel that is the equal of an excellent, moving original and in some ways surpasses it."

--Bruce Berskine, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

"The Famished Lover is masterfully written..."

--Kelly-Anne Riess, Regina Leader-Post

Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Giller Prize.

The Famished Lover is published by Goose Lane Editions.

earListen to Alan Cumyn reading from The Famished Lover (5 minutes, 2.2 MB).

ReadRead an excerpt.

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