Robertson Davies

“An amazing coup . . . a brilliant, never less than engaging work of fiction which is also a philosophical meditation on the business of living.”—Financial Times
 
When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high alter on Good Friday, Dr. Jonathan Hullah—whose holistic work has earned him the label “Cunning Man” (for the wizard of folk tradition)—wants to know why. The physician-cum-diagnostician’s...

The first book in the acclaimed Cornish Trilogy. “[A] darkly funny scuttle through academe’s more covert passageway . . . saucy stuff indeed.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
Davies weaves together the destinies of this remarkable cast of characters, creating a wise and witty portrait of love, murder, and scholarship at a modern university in this first book of The Cornish Trilogy....

There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to undertake a project worthy of Francis Cornish-connoisseur, collector, and notable eccentric-whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The grumpy, grimy, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann's unfinished opera...

“Davies introduces us to his alter ego . . . A humorous and insightful picture of postwar Canadian life as seen through the eyes of a delightful eccentric.”—Library Journal
 
As editor and later publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, Robertson Davies published witty, curmudgeonly, mischievous, and fiercely individualistic columns under the name of his alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks....