"I brushed the crumbs off of the fish and back onto the counter, threw the smelts in the frying pan while I got the eggs out of the fridge and cracked one."

The Smeltdog Man is the story of how a Cape Bretoner marshalled his accidental invention, a marijuana-induced, munchie-inspired Smeltdog, into the most successful fast food franchise in Canada. As president of his newly formed Good Karma Corporation, he tells the tale of how his business empire grows beyond his control, turning him into a billionaire.

While the business booms and the narrator's wisdom is being constantly tapped for new ideas and strategies, he consults his Granddaddy Blue, whose pragmatic mixture of horse-trader economics and 1960s hippie ideals provide his grandson with the guiding principles and necessary scams he needs to survive in the corporate world.

From the simplicity of its origins to the ecological disaster of its success, The Smeltdog Man details the influences of country music on our narrator's understanding of himself, the longing of unrequited love and the accumulation of wealth possessing more zeros than our hero can count.

Frank Macdonald is the award-winning author of A Forest for Calum (CBU Press 2005) and A Possible Madness (CBU Press 2011), both long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and both finalists for an Atlantic Book Award. A long-time and award-winning columnist, Macdonald is also an accomplished writer of short stories, drama, poetry and songs. His humorous, often satirical columns in the Inverness Oran have twice been anthologized; Assuming I’m Right in 1990 became a stage production that has toured Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. His play Her Wake won Best Canadian Play at the Liverpool International Theatre Festival in 2010 and, also in 2010, he authored T.R.’s Adventure at Angus the Wheeler’s (CBU Press), a children's book, illustrated by Virginia McCoy. Frank lives in Inverness, Cape Breton. A new novel, Tinker and Blue is due for publication in the fall of 2014.

Frank Macdonald's profile page