Solomon Gursky Was Here - Softcover

Richler, Mordecai

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140152989 ISBN 13: 9780140152982

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1991

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 1990 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1990 Since the age of eleven Moses Berger has been obsessed with the Gursky clan, an insanely wealthy, profoundly seductive family of Jewish-Canadian descent. Now a 52-year-old alcoholic boigrapher, Berger is desperately trying to chronicle the stories of their lives, especially that of the mysterious Solomon Gursky, who may or may not have died in a plane crash. A rich, irreverent and exuberant comic masterpiece from the author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St Urbain's Horseman.

About this title

About the Author:

Mordecai Richler was an acclaimed Canadian novelist and essayist born in Montreal in 1931. He won the Commonwealth Prize, the Paris Review Humour Prize, was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novels Solomon Gursky Was Here and St. Urbain's Horseman, and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He died in 2001.

From Library Journal:

After a ten-year hiatus, Richler, one of Canada's premier novelists, returns with a ribald reworking of Canadian history that chronicles the fortunes of the mythical Gursky family. (His last novel was Joshua Then and Now, LJ 5/15/80.) From patriarch Ephraim, a con man who arrived with a doomed British Arctic exploration team, through his bootlegger grandsons Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who parlayed prohibition into a distillery fortune, the Gurskys' penchant for grand and petty larceny is played off against upper-crust Canadian and English society, torn between greed and anti-Semitism. Moses Berger, Solomon's appropriately alcoholic biographer, assembles the pieces of Gursky history in a hilarious narrative that jumps back and forth from Victorian England to modern Montreal and all points in between. With a cast of outlandishly funny characters, Richler skewers the pretensions of the rich, the religious, and the avaricious in his best novel yet. Essential. BOMC alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/89.
- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140152989
• ISBN 13: 9780140152982
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432