Principles To Live By

The masterful new novel from a Canadian literary legend at the height of his powers.

John Delano is a broken man, seemingly at the end of everything: the end of his legendary but controversial career as a police officer; the end of his sad and difficult marriage; the end of his years-long search for the truth of what happened to his missing son; the end of his fruitless quest for personal redemption; even, perhaps, the end of his life. Only one small thing keeps him going: his conviction that he has a final case to solve, centred around the disappearance years ago of a young boy placed in foster care in Saint John, New Brunswick. Following the delicate and convoluted thread of that case takes John to unexpected places: dangerously close to powerful civil servants hoarding damning secrets; to a Canadian humanitarian mission in Rwanda before and during the genocide; to New York and the compromised corridors of the United Nations; and deep into his own haunted past.
     With this new masterwork, David Adams Richards continues to astonish us, weaving familiar themes in fresh new ways. His people are still rooted in his beloved Miramichi region of New Brunswick, but his storytelling--as always, displaying his genius for plot and his extraordinary empathy for his flawed characters--has expanded to encompass the much wider world that his people traverse: the politically charged, intricately connected modern universe in all its richness, contradiction, devastation and little points of hope. In the end, what ties John Delano to every other unforgettable character in this compelling work is the shared search for principles to live by: as each person decides what those principles shall be, their fates inevitably and heartbreakingly intertwine.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS is one of Canada’s preeminent writers. He co-won the 2000 Giller Prize for Mercy Among the Children, and is one of few writers in the history of the Governor General’s Literary Awards to win in both the Fiction (Nights Below Station Street) and Literary Non-fiction (Lines on the Water) categories. More recently, The Lost Highway was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. The Friends of Meagre Fortune was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Over his extensive career, his fiction has won the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-Language Literary Arts, the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards for Author of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, among other prizes. Richards is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi Trilogy, four bestselling books of non-fiction, and recent novels Crimes Against My Brother and Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, which were published to wide acclaim. He lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.