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Roger McDonald is one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, and with MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER he claims a prominent place in international literature. The story of the manservant described by Charles Darwin's biographer as "the unacknowledged shadow behind every triumph," MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER is a deeply imagined and stunningly well executed exploration of natural marvels and scientific discovery, masters and servants, ambition and adventure, and, above all, one of history's most significant crises of faith.As a boy, Syms Covington was watched over by the beckoning image of Christian, John Bunyan's pilgrim, in the stained-glass window of his Bedford chapel--and at thirteen he left home and went to sea with the evangelical sailor John Phipps. Phipps's catechizing could not, however, repress Covington's appetite for life and passage into manhood as he sailed the world, surveying Patagonia and losing his virginity in the Pampas. Aboard the HMS Beagle, he entered Darwin's service, an energetic and precocious fifteen-year-old. In the course of their voyages together over the next seven years, he shot and collected hundreds of specimens for his "gent," specimens that became fundamental to the formulation of Darwin's theory of evolution.Now a crusty, near-deaf man of middle age, Covington has settled in Australia and is awaiting the arrival of the first copy of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Beset by guilt over participating in a work that will shake the human worldview to its foundations, he nonetheless wonders what part of himself might be reflected in Darwin's oeuvre. MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER captures its time with rare and dazzling skill, evoking an unforgettable--but forgotten--man at a watershed moment in history.

"Mr. McDonald is a generous, leisurely author who gives the reader a large cast of quirky characters, much peripheral detail, lively action, and a view of nineteenth-century social patterns....One need not be pro or anti either Darwin or Genesis to enjoy this well-written tale."

Phoebe-Lou Adams, Atlantic Monthly, February 1999

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