National Network for Equitable Library Service

Douglas Glover’s acclaimed novel The Life and Times of Captain N. is now available in a GLE Library edition. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart, the novel was acclaimed by the most respected critics in Canada and the US, and compelled The Toronto Star’s Philip Marchand to call Glover “one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation.” Set on the Niagara frontier in the final days of the American Revolution, The Life and Times of Captain N. sees the revolutionary new world order from the standpoint of the losers. Hendrick Nellis, a Tory guerrilla, has also been a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. His son Oskar finds himself sometimes allied with the Indians, sometimes at war with them. Hendrick kidnaps Oskar for King George’s army, and Oskar, haunted by dreams and by books, is the teller of the tale. The book he intends to write is sketched out in his letters to George Washington and in the signs tattooed on his skin as mementos of his personal Indian wars. The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the no-man’s-land where the delirium of combat drives races, genders, languages, and ideas into a primeval frenzy. Master of the psyche’s primitive depths, Douglas Glover draws the reader into a violent and erotic emotional whirlpool. Some of the incidents in The Life and Times of Captain N. are based on the lives of the real Hendrick Nellis and his family, and, says Glover, “I have no doubt their descendants and relatives on both sides of the border will find much to complain of.”