The time is the seventies. The place is Ottawa, a developing city ready for the taking. Two men from very different backgrounds take up the challenge: Jerry McGuinty, plasterer turned builder, a simple, self-made man who claims he can plaster a wall that will change your life; and Simon Struthers, a disaffected businessman whose inherited wealth and position cannot fill the hollowness he feels inside.

With their different careers and successes, these two strangers seek to carve out their own happiness—Jerry with his new wife and Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues. As the men's careers and successes run parallel, we see how love is suffocated by work and how individuals are crushed by greed and "progress." With skill, energy, humour and poetry, Colin McAdam creates a world of ambition and desire, power and corruption. Some Great Thing is one of the most thrillingly original novels in years.

Colin McAdam's profile page

COLIN McADAM has written for Harper's and The Walrus. His novel A Beautiful Truth won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. His first novel, Some Great Thing, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the U.K. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec.

"[A] compelling, bawdy debut.... Technical prowess and a surprising empathy mark McAdam as a writer to watch." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A powerful, poetic, bawdily funny, and tenderly sad novel about class, about love, about drink, about poetics, about land, and about money—a few of the salient things that life and history are made of." —O, The Oprah Magazine

"The novel presents many voices, all of them mesmerizing ... McAdam displays a superb ear for dialogue." —The Washington Post

"McAdam's narrative weaves in virtuoso dialogue as well as genuine warmth.... This is a big and staggeringly confident book." —The Observer