From the publisher
Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishman’s Boy (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor’s General’s Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., and The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).
Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancock’s Dance, was produced in 1995.
Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.
From the Hardcover edition.
Details
-
Title
My Present Age
-
Author
Guy Vanderhaeghe
-
Binding
Paperback
-
Edition
First Thus
-
Pages
272
-
Volumes
1
-
Language
ENG
-
Publisher
Emblem Editions, Toronto
-
Date
April 15, 2000
-
ISBN
9780771086830 / 0771086830
-
Weight
0.81 lbs (0.37 kg)
-
Dewey Decimal Code
FIC
Media reviews
“It is compulsively readable…and presents us with wholly credible people. This is realism at its best.…”
–Financial Times (U.K.)
“Vanderhaeghe’s considerable achievement in the novel is to explore the bleak landscape of contemporary relationships with uncommon insight and to create a memorable character who evokes our sympathy despite – or perhaps because of – his many frailties.”
–Globe and Mail
“[Vanderhaeghe is] a savagely funny writer.…[He] has created the perfect vessel from which to launch his kamikaze sorties into contemporary life.…He has created one of the more quirkily appealing characters in recent fiction.”
–Washington Post
“[A] masterful novel.…Not a single false note mars the author’s graceful, precise depiction of the present era and its pitfalls.”
–ALA Booklist (U.S.)
“[Vanderhaeghe is] an author of palpable and protean gifts.”
–Boston Globe
“My Present Age is black comedy at its intimate and subversive best.”
–Douglas Barbour, Canadian Literature
“Very nearly unique among present-day novels of any sort: like Philip Roth and almost no one else, Vanderhaeghe has the ability to make you root for the protagonist without setting up straw men or women for the protagonist.…”
–Greil Marcus, Express, Berkeley (U.S.)
“A fast, fluent and very funny novel.…This is a hilarious, bleakly realistic comedy about modern life’s conformists and casualties. Or more precisely, about what can happen when it’s finally time to grow up – and you can’t.”
–Imagine Magazine (U.K.)
“[A] wonderful first novel.…Brilliantly funny and very sad.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“Compassionate, humorous, and thematically important.”
–Bloomsbury Review (U.S.)
“A deftly done novel.…[My Present Age] is astonishing in conception and execution.…”
–San Diego Magazine
“An irresistible first novel.…An achievement.…”
–Spectator (U.K.)
“A beautifully sustained performance.”
–USA Today
About the author
GUY VANDERHAEGHE was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. His previous fiction includes A Good Man, The Last Crossing, The Englishman's Boy, Things as They Are (stories), Homesick, My Present Age, Man Descending (stories), and Daddy Lenin and Other Stories. Among the many awards he has received are the Governor General's Awards (three times); and, for his body of work, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship, the Writers' Trust Timothy Findley Award, and the Harbourfront Literary Prize. He has received many honours including the Order of Canada.
