The Deptford Trilogy

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.”

The second novel in Robertson Davies’ critically acclaimed Deptford Trilogy, The Manticore is a fascinating exploration, by an exquisite stylist, of those regions beyond reason where monsters live. Available as an eBook for the first time. David Staunton, the son of Percy Boyd Staunton, travels to Switzerland. As he undergoes Jungian analysis for a lifetime of unhappiness and the trauma left by the death of his father, he repeatedly encounters a manticore—a monster with the head of a man, the body of lion, and the tail of a scorpion. “He is to say the least a mature and wise writer.” Anthony Burgess

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

The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The debut novel that launched Robertson Davies’ literary career, Tempest-Tost is a magnificent display of his legendary wit. The first novel in The Salterton Trilogy is now available as an eBook for the first time. An amateur production of The Tempest provides a colourful backdrop for a hilarious look at unrequited love. Mathematics teacher Hector Mackilwraith, stirred and troubled by Shakespeare’s plays, falls in love with the beautiful Griselda Webster. When Griselda shows she has plans of her own, Hector despairs and tries to commit suicide on the play’s opening night.

Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Leaven of Malice is the second novel in Robertson Davies’ much-loved Salterton Trilogy. Available as an eBook for the first time. The following announcement appeared in the Salterton Evening Bellman: “Professor and Mrs. Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq., son of . . .” Although the malice that prompted this false engagement notice was aimed at three people only–Solly Bridgetower, Pearl Vambrace, and Gloster Ridley, the anxiety-ridden local newspaper editor–before the leaven of malice had ceased to work it had changed permanently, for good or ill, the lives of many citizens of Salterton. This is the second novel in The Salterton Trilogy (which also includes Tempest-Tost and A Mixture of Frailties).

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.

The Cunning Man is a perceptive and entertaining memoir of a doctor’s life, available as an eBook for the first time. When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high altar on Good Friday, Dr. Jonathan Hullah—whose holistic work has earned him the label “Cunning Man” (for the wizard of the folk tradition)—wants to know why. The physician-cum-diagnostician’s search for answers compels him to look back over his own long life. He conjures vivid memories of the dazzling intellectual high jinks and compassionate philosophies of his circle, including flamboyant, mystical curate Charlie Iredale; cynical, quixotic professor Brocky Gilmartin; outrageous banker Darcy Dwyer; and jocular, muscular artist Pansy Todhunter. In compelling and hilarious scenes from the divine comedy of life, The Cunning Man reveals profound truths about being human. In Robertson Davies’ last novel, he returns to those issues which concerned him throughout his writing career–the nature of friendship, religion, faith, and artistic life–with his famous wit and humour and his usual rich characterization.