Famished Lover (Hardcover)

by Alan Cumyn (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In Ramsay Crome, critically acclaimed author Alan Cumyn has created a man of intense appetite: for beauty; for human contact; for life and love. In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. Upon his return home to Montreal, he meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. In his post-traumatic world, Ramsay cannot share her faith and cannot explain about Margaret. A man who adores women and the beauty of the female form, he embarks on a passionate affair with a co-worker, until the time comes to choose between the present and the future. The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn's most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man's hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing.

About the Author
For Alan Cumyn, the desire for expression through the written word began early. Born in Ottawa in 1960, he started writing poetry and short stories in high school. After university he spent a year in China as an English as a Second Language teacher. That year abroad sparked a career in international development and human rights. It served as the inspiration for both Cumyn's first novel, Waiting for Li Ming, published by Goose Lane Editions in 1993, and for his popular guide to work and study abroad, What in the World is Going On?, first published in 1988. The Famished Lover's Ramsay Crome lives with the emotional fallout from his incarceration in a First World War POW camp, an experience shared by Cumyn's real-life great uncle and which served as inspiration for this book. And yet, as much as this work explores this trauma, Cumyn says it is foremost a story of love. "What does "love" mean when you're starving in a POW camp or trying to make a living as an artist in Montreal in the Great Depression? In what unusual ways do hearts respond in the most trying of times?" Alan Cumyn has lived all over Canada as well as abroad in China and Indonesia. Today he makes his home in Ottawa with his wife and two daughters. He is Writer in Residence at the University of Ottawa this fall (2006) and chair of the Writers in Prison committee of PEN Canada. He is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including Burridge Unbound, a finalist for the Giller Prize, and The Sojourn, the novel in which Ramsay Crome first appears. He is working on screenplays for both Burridge Unbound and his comic novel Losing It.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (September 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0864924488
• ISBN-13: 978-0864924483
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,591,309 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #5 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( C ) > Cumyn, Alan