With this, his first novel, Bruce MacDonald juggles the themes of economics, love, religion, spirituality, and self-delusion with the balance, dexterity, and mastery of an old hand from Cirque du Soleil. Smart, funny, and profoundly seditious, Coureurs de Bois is an exhilarating and satiric tour-de-force an eloquent, insightful, and contemporary novel that counterpoints iconoclastic acerbic wit with honest compassion and seduces with its compelling and provocative characters, scathing societal critique, and a playfully applied sense of mysticism. Coureurs de Bois recounts the impudent odyssey of William Tobe, an Ottawa-born economics grad, who moves to Toronto and falls under the spell of the recently paroled Randall Cobb Seymour. "The Cobb" is a vengefully shrewd and charismatic Native Canadian part Mohawk, part Ojibway the embodiment of the trickster and a powerfully animated personality of cunning, gall, and uninhibited entrepreneurial instincts. He is hell-bent on beating the white man at his own dirty game and, in doing so, he masters what he calls "the Queen's economy." Good-hearted Will not only becomes involved in Cobb's scams, but finds himself swept up in his own evolving, urban vision quest.

Bruce Macdonald
Born in Vancouver in 1948, Bruce Macdonald grew up in West Vancouver and studied engineering at the University of British Columbia. He taught at alternative and secondary schools for several years.

Macdonald learned state-of-the art computer graphic and cartographic programs in order to create Vancouver: A Visual History (1992), a project that took eight years to complete.

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