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CloseA true Canadian literary masterpiece, Fifth Business is the bestselling first novel in the Deptford Trilogy, now available in a stunning new edition
Fifth Business, which one critic said was “as masterfully executed as anything in the history of the novel,” centres around the life of a schoolteacher named Dunstan Ramsay. Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of World War I and is destined to be caught in 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 mystical, perhaps pernicious influence on those around him. One of the classics of Canadian fiction, Ramsay’s story is that of a rational man who discovers that the marvellous is only another aspect of the real.