In this new edition of Jack Hodgins’ Governor General–winning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nymph is washed ashore from a stranded freighter. People begin grasping at new possibilities. There’s the giant cactus the mayor installs to attract the tourist trade, the personal life of Jenny Chambers, ex-stripper, is exposed, and the Kick-and-Kill beer parlour becomes home to wild events. But there is also Joseph Bourne himself, once a world-renowned poet and healer, who has become a bitter recluse. Bourne knows that the endless rain is going to bring a landslide down on the town, and he fears that the mysterious woman has come looking for him. In the end he dies and is resurrected – an experience that allows him to regain his healing powers so that he can work his magic on the townsfolk. With his energetic style and his comic characterization, Hodgins combines the ordinary with the wondrous.

Jack Hodgins was raised in Merville, on Vancouver Island, and graduated from the University of British Columbia. Until recently, he taught fiction writing at the University of Victoria. His novels and story collections include: Spit Delaney’s Island, The Invention of the World, Innocent Cities, Broken Ground, Distance, and Damage Done by the Storm. In the spring of 2010, he published his newest novel, The Master of Happy Endings (Thomas Allen). A Passion for Narrative (a guide to writing fiction) is used in classrooms and writing groups across Canada and Australia. Hodgins’ fiction has won the Governor General’s Award, the Canada-Australia Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, amongst others. He has given readings, talks, and workshops in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and several European countries, and has taught an annual fiction workshop in Mallorca, Spain. In 2006 he received both the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in British Columbia. In 2009 the Governor General appointed him a Member of the Order of Canada. He and his wife Dianne have three grown children and three grandchildren. Jack Hodgins’ website is www.jackhodgins.ca

Jack Hodgins' profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Award

“Crammed with colour and bursting with characters . . . A novel of hope and life.” —Times Colonist

“Jack Hodgins’ stories do one of the best things fiction can do — they reveal the extra dimension of the real place, they light up the crazy necessities of real life.” —Alice Munro

“Jack Hodgins’ stories do one of the best things fiction can do — they reveal the extra dimension of the real place, they light up the crazy necessities of real life.”—Alice Munro

“Crammed with colour and bursting with characters . . . A novel of hope and life.”—Times Colonist