Murder and Walking Spirits

13 hrs. 42 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Robertson Davies

Narrator Sergey Kirsanov

Robertson Davies is Canada’s greatest writer, a master of plot intricacies and riddles, one of the best storytellers in English-language literature. His “Deptford Trilogy” (“The Fifth Person,” “Manticore,” “What’s in the Bones”) was considered the beginning of a “Canadian breakthrough” in world literature. He made it onto the Booker shortlist (with “What’s in the Bones” from the Cornish Trilogy), received Canada’s top literary honor—the Governor General’s Award—and toward the end of his life almost received the Nobel Prize; yet even remaining among the candidates forever, he earned the status of a world classic.

As the English satirist of the seventeenth century Samuel Butler wrote: “Printers find from experience that one Murder costs two Monsters and no fewer than three Unbodied Ghosts.” “But if you add Unbodied Ghosts to Murder, no other Tale will compare.” And the hero of this novel will have to test that wise thought for himself—because in the very first lines, Connor Gilmartin, the culture editor of the newspaper “The Voice,” becomes an unbodied ghost: he catches his wife in bed with a lover and receives from him (his subordinate, a theater critic) a club blow to the head. Then some unknown force leads Connor’s spirit first “into the eighteenth century, which, by the scale of all human history, was practically yesterday”—and it doesn’t stop there; and now “the signature Davies time-machine unfolds vivid scenes of the past, full of wonder and mischief” (The Los Angeles Times Book Review). But why does Connor see scenes from the lives of his own ancestors, and what does it have to do with a church called “The Immanuel Swedenborg Society, of Learned and Prophetic Nature”?

1. Murder and Walking Spirits 2. The Manticore (narrated by Sergey Kirsanov)