This collection features Canadian characters and settings, mostly the Maritime Provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, some mixed with international settings in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Europe and Asia. Genre include action and adventure, romance, mood pieces, flash fiction, dystopian sketches and satire. A leitmotif running through the book is the issue of identity, whether personal, ethnic or national. A series about Maurice, who defines himself from early childhood as a bad boy, depicts his pursuit of a more satisfying identity. The longest story, a novella in 16 episodes, follows a couple from courtship at college to retirement in Eastern Europe, a series of hilarious misadventures. Another, Gone Like A Train, tells of a small boy neglected and abused by his mother who is arrested and jailed, losing her son to adoption, yet many years later they are reunited. De Profundis details the sorry career of a tormented homosexual who is tempted by both murder and suicide. Cursed is the story of 2 backpackers who desecrate a sacred Muslim site in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco; as a result, they become victims of a curse.
In Vaya con Dios a hapless older woman is hustled and deserted by a Cuban fortune hunter. Added at London tells of a retired man who, like King Lear, fails in his attempts to live in his retirement with his adult children. As well as working as an active writer of short fiction and literary essays, Roger C. Lewis is Professor of English Literature (Emeritus) at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, teaching online courses, including graduate studies, there and at Athabasca University in Alberta. He was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and was educated at the University of Toronto (B.A., M.A.
, Ph.D.) He has published many articles and books including: Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal (Wombat Press, 1977), The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh UP, 2003)A Variorum Edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sonnet Sequence "The House of Life" (Cambridge UK: D.S. Brewer, 2007). He was Editor-in-Chief of the last eight volumes of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Cambridge UK: Boydell &. Brewer, 2003-2015); taking over from the original editor, William E. Fredeman who died suddenly in 1999, having completed the first two volumes.
He lives in the SlocanValley of British Columbia with his wife Nancy and dog Bruce, close to some of his sons and grandsons.