Some Great Thing

By Colin McAdam

“A powerful, poetic, bawdily funny, and tenderly sad novel about class, about love, about drink, about poetics, about land, and about money—a few of the salient things that life and history are made of.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

In his highly acclaimed debut novel, Colin McAdam depicts the struggle between two men involved in building a city’s future: developer Jerry McGuinty, blue collar, selfmade, a master craftsman, and Simon Struthers, a civil servant from a prominent, wealthy background who shapes land-use policy. Jerry has a blind spot for his alcoholic wife, and Simon moves between women, consumed by a frantic emptiness. When their two stories begin to intertwine, their lives and ambitions are set on a collision course. A richly observed story of family, class, love and the individual contributions we make to the bigness of the world, Some Great Thing is a powerful work from one of the most exciting voices of his generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781616954444

Colin McAdam

Colin McAdam's novel Some Great Thing won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the United Kingdom. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. He has written for Harper's and lives in Toronto.

Reviews for Some Great Thing

[kirstiecat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked up this book while in Ottawa for two Canadian dollars (and the way our economy is headed, next week, the looney will be worth more than any George Washington.) Anyhow, it was on the bargain bin at a Chapters there (which is much like Borders in the states only they play Neon Bible in it's entirety. I gave it my good old random passage test which, as any avid reader will be sure to know, means turning to a random page and if the paragraph is worthy, you chance the book. The paragraph I read had to do with a seven year old boy having trouble still with bedwetting and I bought the book which maybe says something about me (for an entire summer as a teenager, I actually worked at a sleepaway camp where one of my jobs was to wash the sleeping bags of the bedwetters and both remove and bring the bedding back before any of the other boys caught on. I was good at that and I felt really happy and proud of myself that none of the young boys were teased because I was remiss.) Anyhow, back to the point...feeling a little rambly. Basically, the book shows promise in terms of the writing style but gosh don't you just hate it when you can't connect with any of the main characters? I mean, both male protagonists are in their 50s or so and just seem completely unattractive...not physically but as people. Like, how about that crazy wife the one man has...why not base the entire book from her perspective... I could go on but I won't. Read the I would recommend this book to...if you're interested in Canada-particularly Ottawa-and housing developments (as well as construction) this is a worthy read. If not, let me recommend some Virginia Woolf...*sigh*