When William Moodie takes a job teaching at the Van Horne Institute of Technological Education, the Young Englishman becomes an unwitting player in the frequently hilarious byzantine snakes and ladders games played in Canadian academia. Then, at the pinnacle of his administrative career, Moodie suddenly finds himself both unemployed and stranded in Canada. On the advice of a Canadian who, of course, has never been there, he sets out to discover the "real" Canada. Like his namesake Susanna, 140 years ago, William gets much more than his fair share of "Roughing It In The Bush." He finds himself somewhere North of Winnipeg, acting as a fishing guide to American tourists. When the bush plane in which he is a passenger, crashes in a remote area, Moodie finds himself once again stranded and face to face with a Canadian wilderness he never bargained for.

Best known as a writer of award-winning detective fiction, including the Charlie Salter mysteries, Eric Wright has also written a comic novel (Moodies Tale) and Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man, his 1999 memoir which was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. (The first chapter of that memoir first appeared in The New Yorker.) Eric helped to set up and was the first director of the publishing program at Ryerson University. He lives in Toronto.

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