The Cornish Trilogy

Bringing together The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus, The Cornish Trilogy is available as an eBook for the first time. Woven around the pursuits of the energetic spirits and erudite scholars of the University of St. John and the Holy Ghost, this dazzling trilogy of novels lures you into a world of mysticism, historical allusion, and gothic fantasy that could only be the invention of the inimitable Robertson Davies. “A biting satire on the artistic muse . . . . This wonderful, witty novel should speak to a worldwide audience.”—Chicago Tribune

Hailed as a literary masterpiece, Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy comes to a brilliant conclusion in The Lyre of Orpheus. Available as an eBook for the first time. There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to undertake a project worthy of Francis Cornish– connoisseur, collector, and notable eccentric–whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The grumpy, grimy, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto. Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengeance; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, “the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld,” seems to be all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed. Baroque and deliciously funny, this third book in The Cornish Trilogy shows Robertson Davies at his very considerable best.

Available as an eBook for the first time, The Rebel Angels is the first book in the celebrated Cornish Trilogy. Gypsies, defrocked monks, mad professors, and wealthy eccentrics—a remarkable cast peoples Robertson Davies’ brilliant spectacle of theft, perjury, murder, scholarship, and love at a modern university. Only Davies, author of Fifth Business, could have woven together their destinies with such wit, humour, and wisdom.

Called “an altogether remarkable creation, his most accomplished novel to date” (The New York Times), What's Bred in the Bone is the second brilliant novel in Robertson Davies’ The Cornish Trilogy. Available as an eBook for the first time. Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, a master art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis’s life were not always what they seemed. In this wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown, Robertson Davies has created a spellbinding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies’ wit and wisdom. “Davies’s make-believe universe has the appeal of a mystic’s vision… What’s Bred in the Bone is vintage Davies.” The Globe and Mail

Elma Clifford found herself thrust, hap-hazard, at the very last moment, into the last compartment of the last carriage of the train -- alone -- with an artist. Now, you and I, to be sure, most proverbially courteous and intelligent reader, might never have guessed at first sight, from the young man's outer aspect, the nature of his occupation. But she recognized him for what he was immediately, and she was right, and his name was Cyril Waring. He was the love of her life. Even in that first moment, Elma probably knew it. The trouble was, it seemed bound to be a short life. Before the train reached its next station, a tunnel through which it was travelling collapsed upon them. . . . All of a sudden a rapid jerk of the carriage pulled up their train unexpectedly. Elma was aware of a loud noise and a crash in front, almost instantaneously followed by a thrilling jar -- a low dull thud -- a sound of broken glass -- a quick blank stoppage. Next instant she found herself flung wildly forward into her neighbor's arms, while the artist, for his part, with outstretched hands, was vainly endeavoring to break the force of the fall for her. All she knew for the first few minutes was merely that there had been an accident to the train. Until the tunnel behind them collapsed as well, and then there was nothing either of them could do but wait. Wait, and, all but certainly, die.

Gathering Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders together, The Deptford Trilogy has been hailed as a modern classic and is available as an eBook for the first time. Woven around a mysterious death, the novels trace the rich and varied, and fatefully linked, lives of Dunstan Ramsay, David Staunton, and Magnus Eisengrim. Davies has created a beguiling, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels, luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history, and magic and providing an exhilarating antidote to a world from where “the fear and dread and splendor of wonder have been banished.”

World of Wonders, the concluding novel in Robertson Davies’ celebrated Deptford Trilogy, is available as an e-book for the first time. Called “a spectacular, soaring work, an astounding tour de force unequaled in recent literature,” World of Wonders follows the story of Magnus Eisengrim—the most illustrious magician of his age—who is spirited away from his home by a member of a traveling sideshow, the Wanless World of Wonders. “One of the great modern novelists.” Sunday Times