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Alan Cumyn, The Famished Lover. (Gooselane Editions)
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Alan Cumyn is the award-winning author of nine wide-ranging and often wildly different novels, seven for adults and two for children. His historical novels The Sojourn and The Famished Lover chronicle the First World War and Great Depression experiences of artist Ramsay Crome. His human rights novels, Man of Bone and Burridge Unbound, follow a torture victim through survival and post-trauma. Losing It is a darkly funny and truly twisted novel about madness, while his Owen Skye books for kids hilariously trace the calamitous trials of childhood and the pangs of early love. Cumyn has an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Windsor where he studied under Alistair MacLeod. He taught English in China and Indonesia, ran a group home in Toronto for Katimavik, and for eight years wrote on international human rights issues for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. He has also been a writing mentor through Humber College and writer in residence at the University of Ottawa. A two-time winner of the Ottawa Book Award, Cumyn has also had adult novels nominated for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award, while his work for children has won or been nominated for ten national awards.
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--------------------------------------------- Ramsay Crome has emerged from the World War I prisoner of war camps barely alive and desperately hungry for life and love. Within months of his return to Montreal, he impulsively marries Lillian, a deeply conservative farm girl. But marriage doesn't begin to fill the void inside him. He can't escape the horror of the camps, and thoughts of Margaret, his idealized wartime sweetheart, torment him.
Through the Depression, Ramsay struggles to provide for his family by painting pinup girls for a small agency, where passions inevitably flare. Finally, a visit from Margaret shatters Ramsay's sense of himself: why is he alive, and how will he continue to live? Alan Cumyn's most mature and accomplished novel explores a traumatized man's struggle for love and meaning in the face of unspeakable violence.
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