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Some Great Thing: A Novel
Some Great Thing: A Novel
Some Great Thing: A Novel
Ebook462 pages

Some Great Thing: A Novel

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

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“A powerful, poetic, bawdily funny, and tenderly sad novel about class, about love, about drink, about poetics, about land, and about money” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
 
Real estate developer Jerry McGuinty is a self-made man from a blue-collar world, a master craftsman who strives to fill the growing Canadian city of Ottawa with beautiful homes and has a soft spot for his alcoholic, unpredictable wife. Simon Struthers is a civil servant from a prominent, wealthy family who shapes land-use policy, and 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, social class, love, and the individual contributions we make to the bigness of the world, Some Great Thing is a reflection on the meaning of home and a “compelling, bawdy debut” (Publishers Weekly).
 
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 21, 2014
ISBN9781616954444
Some Great Thing: A Novel
Author

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.

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Rating: 2.9333334 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    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*

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Some Great Thing - Colin McAdam

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