When an early-morning phone call from a former childhood friend threatens to derail the political fortunes of a popular PM, his director of communications must dig deep into the past to salvage the present. Part political and literary coming-of-age story, part lyrical meditation on friendship, family, and mortality, Sons and Fathers traces the fortunes of three men who develop their respective ability for manipulating words and people in the long shadows cast by their accomplished fathers. Filled with insights about the nature of politics, journalism, and fatherhood, this semi-autobiographical first novel established Daniel Goodwin as a unique voice in Canadian literature.

Born in Montreal, Daniel Goodwin grew up in a bookish and artistic Montreal household (Irving Layton was an omnipresent great-uncle, Betty Goodwin a more distant aunt). After a misspent youth writing poetry, he ran away to the East Coast in his mid-twenties to join an oil company. He has since lived in four provinces and worked as a teacher, journalist, corporate communicator and government relations executive, but through it all he continued to write, and his poems and essays have appeared in several Canadian journals and newspapers including Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Verse II, The Antigonish Review, The Globe and Mail, and Calgary Herald. Goodwin's first novel, Sons and Fathers - about that special relationship, but also about politics, journalism, poetry, and spin - will be published in fall 2014 by Linda Leith Publishing. Goodwin currently lives in Calgary with his wife and three children.

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