Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller. A ship's carpenter becomes stranded on a small Mediterranean island. He has completely lost his memory but in exchange has acquired the ability to speak, write, and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later, in Beirut, he's hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for Black September. Feeling disillusioned with both of these occupations, he treks on foot across the Galilean hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange communities evoking biblical times. He eventually settles with a Palestinian family and unwittingly becomes entangled in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

Dave Margoshes has published more than a dozen books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His collection of stories, Bix's Trumpet and Other Stories, was Saskatchewan Book of the Year, won the Regina Book Award and was a finalist in the ReLit Awards in 2007. His three novels are Drowning Man, I Am Frankie Stern, and We Who Seek: A Love Story. He has published four other story collections, five volumes of poetry and several non-fiction works, including a biography of Tommy Douglas.
He has had stories and poems published in dozens of magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States (including six times in Best Canadian Stories), had work broadcast on CBC, and given readings across the country. His awards include the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry. He was also a finalist for the Journey Prize.
Some of his stories and poems spring from his days as an itinerant journalist. Margoshes worked for daily newspapers in eight cities, including San Francisco, New York, Calgary and Vancouver, covering everything from politics to murder to cat shows. He's also taught journalism. He currently lives near Saskatoon.

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Dave Margoshes's A Simple Carpenter is many things: a meditation on memory and identity, on religious faith and doubt, on the yearning for a messiah, and on the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations. Out of all these elements he has constructed a tale that is part mystery and part fable that blends present day realities with myth and magic. This is a novel as beguiling as it is ambitious.
- Guy Vanderhaeghe Author of August Into Winter
Dave Margoshes' new novel, A Simple Carpenter, is fully original and equally surprising, part fable, part travelogue complete with historical details and occasionally political, part post-modern mystery, sometimes (the reader suspects) approaching a revelatory religious text replete with extraordinary happenings that might be miracles (or not) including helpful monkeys, Biblical creatures and a large black bird. As the carpenter wanders on his not-quite-quest - or is it? - I followed Margoshes' hero/anti-hero with unflagging interest focusing hard to figure out who he actually is, what the story really is, and where it could be going. This is a novel written out of deep thought, enormous cleverness, leavened by a satirical sense of humour. I was riveted right to the startling ending. I can't recommend A Simple Carpenter highly enough.
- Sharon Butala author of Leaving Wisdom