Advance Praise from Carol Shields, author of Unless and The Stone Diaries

"I read The Moor Is Dark Beneath the Moon with great pleasure and with a particular appreciation for its narrative energy; one wants to go on turning over those pages. I loved the Cornish stuff and felt affection for the kids, the teenagers--well, more than affection, more like an instant recognition." -- Carol Shields

After decades in Canada, Davey Bryant returns to Cornwall, England, for the funeral of a mysterious relative and lands in the middle of a property-inheritance squabble that threatens to escalate into something far worse.

Distraught by the changed landscape of his beloved homeland, Davey wanders the lonely moors and is soon sleuthing his way through a farce of megalithic proportions in which a midget couple driving a Morris Mini van might or might not be reincarnations of an evil Camelot dwarf and his consort. In the course of his investigations, Davey becomes ever more dislocated in time as he tries to fathom the nature of a gay family tree that besides himself may include a spinster aunt and a good-looking teenage cousin named Quentin.

Magic's in the air, and it's not just the glint of the BBC cameras shooting a mini-series about merlin and King Arthur in Tintagel. As Davey says about the moors, "Lots of things have died out here. And not just bodies, but hopes and strange loves. Nothing is really quite as it seems."

David Watmough is the author of a cycle of fictions that features gay "everyman" Davey Bryant, who has appeared in twelve volumes, including No More into the Garden (1978), Unruly Skeletons (1982), The Year of Fears (1987), The Time of Kingfishers (1994), and Hunting With Diana (1996). Watmough is also a playwright, short-story writer, critic, broadcaster, and the author of nine other books. His novel Thy Mother's Glass (1992) was nominated in 2002 for CBC's Canada Reads. He lives in Vancouver.

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