A man in a crawlspace. A woman and her cart. A doctor in an African village. A girl celebrating New Year's. And an Egyptian Revolutionary in front of a computer screen. These five, seemingly unrelated narratives span the globe, blurring the boundaries between the trivially mundane and the profound. Jump the Devil brings its readers on a cross-cultural voyage which inextricably links the lives of the narrators, asking the reader to decipher the clues tucked away in the pages with a deft subtlety."There must have been a bad bite. Something had gestated. He wasn't imagining it. There were wet, frozen pebbles tumbling in his veins. There was a sugary sense of euphoria, a smell of orange blossoms, of piss, of diesel.">

Richard Rathwell was born in Ottawa, ON, in 1944. A student of Robin Blaser and Jerry Zazlov at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Rathwell was arrested for his active life leading political organizations which ran afoul with authorities. Denounced in Parliament as a revolutionary for his involvement in the Gastown Riots, Rathwell has since taught English in Canada, Ireland, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho, and has worked in development aid in conflict areas, serving as international operations director of large NGO's based in Vienna and London. Rathwell has channelled his experiences into poetry, children's drama, short stories and novels, which have been published in Canada, the US, UK, Ireland, and Albania, and have won various national awards in Ireland, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. He is currently a Doctoral candidate at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, and divides his time between London and Southern France.

Richard Rathwell's profile page

"Rathwell's writing is "a fistful of sentences written with the subtlety of a geisha and the terse certainty of stainless steel..."

John Olson, Author

With Jump the Devil, Richard Rathwell has masterfully interwoven the plots of five seemingly unrelated storylines to create one coherent narrative that spans the globe and works to blend the seemingly mundane with the profound, deftly providing readers the necessary clues to unlocking the story. Transcending borders, cultures, generations, and social mores, Jump the Devil brings to life the notion of the global village as it exists in the 21st Century.-- Editors