A Person of Letters is a satire on writing, publishing, love, obsession, and guilt, by Ron Thompson.
Release: September 2015
Paperback available at Amazon.com and its international affiliates. Ask for it at your favourite bookstore.
Ebook available from Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
ISBN: 9780994796103 (Paper) / 9780994796110 (ebook)
Buy the paperback signed by the author! Click here for details.
Synopsis: There is something odd about him. He’s a genius with numbers, and he’s fascinated by words, but he just doesn’t get people. With all their coded talk and body language they are a lifelong mystery, a black box without a key. That’s why he gravitated years ago to the backrooms of finance; he was comfortable there, calculating risk and designing derivatives. Credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities were far less complicated than human beings.
Now it’s 2008, and global markets are melting down, but he’s no longer thinking up derivatives. He’s written a book, an historical epic—the long-awaited Great Canadian Novel, if only he could get it published. He’s struck out at every turn, and the uncertainty is eating him up. He is beset by doubt, unsure about his talent and the choices he has made. What’s more, he’s got a horrendous case of writer’s block. He can’t seem to get going on his next great epic. “You’re a writer,” his best friend counsels. “Write your way out of it.” And so he tries, beginning with his own story, reflecting on his choices and where they have led, his obsessions, his writing quest; and Genny, the great love of his life. His is a rollercoaster journey that wends from the western prairie through the halls of Oxford, to London, the Kalahari, and Wall Street on 9/11; and finally to Toronto’s Little Poland, where he’s gone off-grid and possibly off the rails.
How does a man with no name become a person of letters? Is he naïve or crazy, or just over-medicated? A Person of Letters is a rollicking riff on creativity and idealism, a deliciously icy snowball aimed at writing and publishing in the digital age.
Ron Thompson lives in Toronto. See his full biography here.
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