The Engineer of Human Souls

Danny Smiricky is a Czech writer who fled his country in 1968 to find asylum in the sheltered world of Edenvale College in Toronto. His New World is an Eden that he sees with Old World eyes; he is touched and exasperated bt its political innocence, wryly amused by the hilarious counter-revolutionary schemes of his fellow emigres, tormented by the Soviet secret agents who dog his footsteps, and he succumbs to the determined flirtations of his prettiest student. At the same time he is undone by memories... of a homeland as lost to him as his youth... of Nadia, the factory girl who was hos first lover... of his career as girl-chaser and feckless hero of the Resistance in a small Bohemian village under the pall of the Nazi occupation, and later under Stalin... a world of heroes, traitors and innocents. --- from book's back cover