Some Great Thing

"Ottawa in the seventies is a field of dreams: a developing city, ripe for the taking. Two men, from different ends of society, see the opportunities: Jerry McGuinty, plasterer-turned-builder, a simple, self-made man, and Simon Struthers, who has inherited wealth and position, all the trappings of success, but is a cipher of a man, with nothing inside him but longing. As their careers and successes run in parallel - Jerry with his new wife, Kathleen, who likes a drink even more than she likes him, and Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues - we begin to see how love is suffocated by work, how individuals are slowly crushed by progress. When both men finally understand what they are losing, and go in search of it, their lives start to intersect, andthe story spirals to its astonishing conclusion. A thrillingly original novel about ambition and desire, power and corruption. Some Great Thing has the same epic emotional grandeur as The Great Gatsby. With great skill, and with huge compassion for his broken characters and their thwarted dreams, Colin McAdam has created one of the finest first novels of recent years"--

Colin McAdam's novel Some Great Thing won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. He has written for Harper's and lives in Toronto.