In the tradition of Martin Amis’ The Information and John Updike’s Henry Bech series comes this ambitious novel about the fray that ensues when intellectuals with different backgrounds and agendas meet under one roof.

Russell Smith’s first full-length novel since the critically acclaimed Noise, this post-colonial comedy is the story of what happens when Caribbean writer Marcus Royston, a worldly, Oxford-educated, jaded writer from the island of Saint Andrew’s finds himself sent to Canada on a cultural exchange, and lodged in the sprawling art nouveau mansion of middle-aged socialite Muriella Pent.

Royston’s motivations are self-preserving, hers are self-advancing, and both find themselves pawns of the politically motivated arts committee behind the exchange program. When two young university students -- a boy and a girl who hate each other -- are drawn into Royston’s fractious orbit, a decidedly unpleasant sexual competition occurs, and life in the leafy enclave of Stilwoode Park becomes more artistic than any of the exchange’s sponsors had ever hoped.

By turns funny, melancholy, and sexually depraved, Muriella Pent is told through a collage of dialogue, letters, newspaper articles, and diary entries. It is an unnerving satire about age and youth, desire and privilege, and about warring definitions of art among people from different parts of the former British Empire.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

“Smith has an insider’s knowledge of what the targets are and the outsider’s sense of where the absurdities lie.” -- The Globe and Mail

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

Russell Smith was born in South Africa and raised in Halifax, the son of a university professor and a teacher. He began his career as a writer in Toronto after studying at universities in France and Canada.

His first novel, How Insensitive, was published in 1994 and nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, and became a bestseller in Canada. He is also the author of the novel Noise, the award winning story collection Young Men, and an illustrated adult fable, The Princess and the Whiskheads.

A popular and controversial weekly columnist with The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith’s articles on a variety of subjects have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Details, Travel and Leisure, Toronto Life, EnRoute, Toro and elsewhere. He is currently working on Russell Smith's Style, a sociological guide to men's clothing, to be published by McClelland and Stewart in the fall of 2005.

Russell Smith lives in Toronto.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page