[To read the introduction and first fifty selections of this feature, published in our January/February 2006 issue, click here.]
51. Fifth Business (1970) by Robertson Davies
Rich, wolfish, charming Boy Staunton throws a snowball with a stone in it at his pal Dunstan Ramsay on the streets of Deptford, a small Ontario town. Like the chaos theory butterfly whose wingbeat ultimately triggers tornadoes, so is this snowball, which hurtles on to fell a pregnant woman and cause madness and a premature birth that create saints, sinners, magicians and suicides. Fifth Business also created an international reputation for Davies, and ultimately led to comparisons with Thomas Mann and Charles Dickens and talk of a Nobel Prize for literature. But its most significant impact, and that of the other two volumes of the Deptford trilogy, was the realization that one...
A.F. Moritz’s The Sentinel (House of Anansi, 2008) received the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize and was chosen by The Globe and Mail for its “100 Best Books of 2009” and its “39 Books of the Decade.” He is editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009.