A delightfully cunning, sharply insightful novel about ambition and subterfuge from the author of the Giller-longlisted novel A Beauty.

This novel's unnamed narrator is so obsessed with the desire to write the biography of her literary hero, the late poet Marianne Rasmussen, that she assumes a false name and talks her way into the house of Rasmussen's former lover, Aubrey Ash. She gets more than a foot in the door--she moves in as a lodger, gaining precious daily contact with frail, crusty, almost-centenarian Aubrey and his handsome, younger (but hardly young) brother Harry.

The would-be biographer tries to ingratiate herself with both the Ash Brothers. She flatters Aubrey and she flirts with Harry, but the harder she tries to get her hands on the coveted prize--access to the Rasmussen papers--the more she gets tangled in a trap that might just be of her own making. Can she resist the temptation to possess, by any means, the letters, photographs and first drafts that could unlock the secret to Marianne Rasmussen's genius?

The Rasmussen Papers is a brilliant reply to Henry James' The Aspern Papers. Connie Gault flips James' story on its head and slides it into contemporary Toronto's Cabbagetown, among the marginalized and dispossessed, people the narrator studies as intently as she studies everyone she meets--until a confrontation on a streetcar makes her reconsider the limits of what you can know of another's story, and how hidden we all are, especially from ourselves.

Connie Gault writes fiction and plays. Her published works include the Coteau Books short story collections, Some of Eve's Daughters (1987), and Inspection of a Small Village (1996). She has also published four plays, Sky, The Soft Eclipse, Otherwise Bob, and Red Lips. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, Turn of the Story: Canadian Stories for the Millennium, and Best Canadian Stories, as well as in several drama anthologies. Her plays have been produced across Canada and her radio dramas have aired on CBC and the BBC World Service. Her work has also been presented internationally in Ireland, Bermuda, the United States and Mexico. Inspection of a Small Village, the title story of her second collection, received the Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award from the University of Nebraska in 1994. Another story The Fat Lady with the Thin Face, was adapted for a film, Solitude, produced by Regina’s Robin Schlacht. The collection received the 1996 City of Regina Book Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. She is the 2007 recipient of the City of Regina Writing Award. A past fiction editor of Grain magazine, she has taught many creative writing classes and often mentors emerging writers through the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Mentorship Program. Born in rural Saskatchewan, she has lived in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia and now makes her home in Regina.  Euphoria is her first novel.

Connie Gault's profile page

"The Rasmussen Papers is an intricate puzzle-box, perfectly-proportioned and opening with a click of recognition--but this variation on a Jamesian theme is completely original and unexpected. Gault presses echoes and refractions on us until quite gently the puzzle opens and we see revealed the inner prize: one lonely mind and soul. The best book I've read in years." -- Marina Endicott, author of The Observer

"The Rasmussen Papers is an urban fox of a novel -- light-boned, beautiful and sly. I loved every inch of it, from the dark knowing of its nose to the quicksilver tip of its tail." -- Alissa York, author of Far Cry