A darkly humourous memoir of a 1960s summer spent in a cemetery.

First published in hardcover in 2008, In the Land of Long Fingernails was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Prize, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the Toronto Book Awards.

During the hazy summer of 1969, Charles Wilkins, then a university student, took a job as a gravedigger in a vast corporate cemetery in the east end of Toronto. The bizarre but true events of that time—a midsummer gravediggers' strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal bone shifting—play out among a Barnum-esque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir.

Amid relentless gallows humour and the inevitable reminders of what it is, finally, to be human, Wilkins provides an unforgettable insider's view of a morbidly fascinating industry. In the Land of Long Fingernails is a story of mortality, materialism, friendship, and sexuality, and the gradual coming of age of an impressionable young man.

A darkly humourous memoir of a 1960s summer spent in a cemetery.

Charles Wilkins wrestled Don Starkell's mountainous diary into the classic work of adventure travel Paddle to the Amazon, praised by The New York Times Book Review as "a model expeditionary journal." The winner of three National Magazine Awards, two American Magazine Association awards and The Gregory Clark Outdoor Writing Award, he has also been a finalist for the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Trillium Book Prize and the Toronto Book Award. His acclaimed non-fiction includes In the Land of Long Fingernails, The Circus at the Edge of the Earth and Walk To New York, and he is the co-author with Gordie Howe of the bestseller After the Applause. He divides his time between Thunder Bay and Muskoka, Ontario.

Charles Wilkins' profile page

Wilkins's strange-but-true memoir . . . will fascinate, disturb and most certainly entertain. —Publisher's Weekly

If Raymond Chandler had written a memoir, I could imagine it reading like this. —Mary Roach