East Germany, 1989. The government of the so-called German Democratic Republic is stumbling through the last months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But in the shadows, the old antagonisms continue between spies and counter-spies, double and triple agents. And a young Canadian intelligence officer, Frank Carpenter, finds himself drawn into a mystery which leads him to a bizarre and personal form of German Reunification. The Griffin in the Griffin’s Wood is a gripping spy novel, expertly set against the backdrop of a critical moment in modern European history, and at the same time a playful game with the genre conventions of the spy novel itself. The novel marks a decided departure for Governor-General’s Award-winning author Stephen Scobie, previously known for his long narrative poems (McAlmon’s Chinese Opera; RLS: At the World’s End), and for his extensive critical work on Canadian literature, as well as on figures such as Georges Braque and Bob Dylan. Thrilling, evocative, and always ironically self-aware, The Griffin in the Griffin’s Wood offers esoteric pleasures to appeal to any reader.

Stephen Scobie
Born in Scotland, Stephen Scobie is a critic and a poet who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1980 and the Prix Gabrielle Roy for Canadian Criticism in 1986. A founding editor of Longspoon Press, his literary criticism includes books on bpNichol, Leonard Cohen, Sheila Watson and Bob Dylan. His first book of poetry, Stone Poems, was published by Talonbooks in 1974. His critical work bpNichol: What History Teaches, published in 1984 is part of the Talonbooks New Canadian Criticism Series, edited by Frank Davey.

Frank Davey
Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. In addition, he co-founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984. Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society?racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic?that drive this play.

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