Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller. A ship's carpenter becomes stranded on a small Mediterranean island. He has completely lost his memory but in exchange has acquired the ability to speak, write, and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later, in Beirut, he's hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for Black September. Feeling disillusioned with both of these occupations, he treks on foot across the Galilean hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange communities evoking biblical times. He eventually settles with a Palestinian family and unwittingly becomes entangled in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer. Most of his adult life has been spent in western Canada, for 35 years, in Saskatchewan. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism ​and creative writing​. He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he's been nominated for the Journey Prize​ several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix's Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. His collection of linked short stories A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon.ca's Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Lifetime Achievement Award. Dave lives on an acreage near Saskatoon.

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Dave Margoshes's A Simple Carpenter is many things: a meditation on memory and identity, on religious faith and doubt, on the yearning for a messiah, and on the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations. Out of all these elements he has constructed a tale that is part mystery and part fable that blends present day realities with myth and magic. This is a novel as beguiling as it is ambitious.
- Guy Vanderhaeghe Author of August Into Winter
Dave Margoshes' new novel, A Simple Carpenter, is fully original and equally surprising, part fable, part travelogue complete with historical details and occasionally political, part post-modern mystery, sometimes (the reader suspects) approaching a revelatory religious text replete with extraordinary happenings that might be miracles (or not) including helpful monkeys, Biblical creatures and a large black bird. As the carpenter wanders on his not-quite-quest - or is it? - I followed Margoshes' hero/anti-hero with unflagging interest focusing hard to figure out who he actually is, what the story really is, and where it could be going. This is a novel written out of deep thought, enormous cleverness, leavened by a satirical sense of humour. I was riveted right to the startling ending. I can't recommend A Simple Carpenter highly enough.
- Sharon Butala author of Leaving Wisdom