description: 1873. Under a full moon, two Assiniboine Indians rustle twenty horses from a group of sleeping white men, wolf hunters taking in their pelts to trade. This sets the scene for two parallel narratives. One is the haunting story of a young drifter known as 'the Englishman's boy' who joins the wolf hunters en route north to Canada on the trail of the horse thieves. Vanderhaeghe's rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the landscape becomes a perfect backdrop for vivid scenes of action, adventure and violence. The other story is set in 1920s Hollywood, where Harry Vincent, a struggling young hack writer in a movie studio, is plucked from obscurity by the enigmatic studio head, Damon Ira Chance. Vincent is enlisted to find the elusive old-time Western actor, Shorty McAdoo. Chance believes McAdoo will be able to provide him with the authentic material he needs to fulfil his ambition to make the big film about the American West. But Chance has a darker ambition and the story Vincent painfully extracts brings the two narratives together in a brutal climax.
language: English
title: The Englishman's Boy
titlecomplete: The Englishman's Boy
genres: Historical, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, 19th Century, Westerns, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Canadian Literature, Canada
ratings_count: 4742
places: Montana, Saskatchewan
series: Frontier trilogy
awards: awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Scotiabank Giller Prize, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist
publisher: Abacus