Product Description

Spellbinding, original, Salamander careens through a world of ideas and stories in which the transforming power of books, the thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality become erotic. It is also a universal story of love and obsession. Set in the eighteenth century, the narrative revolves around a world-spanning quest for the infinite book. Along the way the novel gathers stories that range from a Chinese tale of jealousy and lost love to the remarkable history of Alexandria’s other great library and to epoch-making moments on the battlefields of colonial America. At the centre of the novel’s unforgettable cast of characters is the London printer Nicholas Flood, a dedicated craftsman who is unprepared for all that awaits him when he accepts an unusual commission. Intricate, humane, infused with humour and pathos, Salamander is an exhilarating, elegantly crafted novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1870024 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-24
• Released on: 2001-04-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 376 pages

Amazon.ca
Salamander, the second novel by Edmonton's Thomas Wharton, takes inspiration from the fictions of Calvino and Borges to tell a highly imaginative adventure yarn about the pleasures of reading, the sensual qualities of the book as object, and the very nature of storytelling. In Wharton's first novel, Icefields, which won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, a late-19th-century doctor falls into a glacial crevasse in the Canadian Rockies. Salamander, set a century earlier, begins its series of stories within stories with a colonel who comes across a destroyed bookshop during the siege of Quebec. There, he's surprised to encounter an educated young woman who tells him a tale of a Slovakian count whose son has died in battle. To console himself, the count constructs a labyrinthine castle full of ever-shifting mechanized rooms and robots. The count hires a London printer named Nicholas Flood to invent an infinite book, but the young printer's affair with the count's daughter threatens both the project and Flood's future.

Wharton's narrative flounders at times by trying to float too many fictional devices and threads at once, but his central idea is delightfully challenging and will appeal to fans of postmodern fiction. The layered story he unveils is a modest model for the sought-after infinite book, one that could contain all possibilities by constantly shape-shifting itself beneath our very eyes. --Nigel Hunt

Review
“A remarkable, electrifying novel.”
–Georgia Straight

“A novel as sensual and fantastic as a fairy tale and as thoughtful and as beautifully written as anything we might expect from
Michael Ondaatje and Isabel Allende.”
–London Free Press

“Audacious. . . . Salamander is about making books; it’s about why we read and what happens to the chain of our lives when we do.…”
–Quill and Quire (starred review)

“Witty, elliptical and provoking.…Delightful.”
–Montreal Gazette

“A cabinet of wonders.…”
–Globe and Mail

“A vigorous, imaginative novel about the power of reading and invention.”
–Quill and Quire

“Salamander is the sort of book every reader hopes to find, earnestly passes along to friends, and returns to in their dreams.…A visceral, compelling novel that will reward both serious inquiry and reading for pure pleasure.…A beautiful, emotionally resonant postmodern novel.”
–National Post

“This novel cannot help but connect deeply with its readers. . . .”
-Edmonton Journal

“It’s all too rare that you pick up a book and find yourself inexorably swept into a different world, thoroughly absorbed in a realm far removed from the here and now.…Salamander captivates its readers, holds them spellbound, and persists in memory long after you’ve turned the final page.…Thoroughly absorbing.…”
–Vancouver Sun

“Wharton’s novel is both spellbinding and encyclopedic.…It is a book lovers’ book and a lovers’ story.”
–New Brunswick Reader

“Salamander is an extraordinary book of possibilities.”
–Calgary Herald

“[Wharton] cement[s] his reputation as one of Canada’s most promising young writers.”
–Maclean’s

From the Back Cover
“A remarkable, electrifying novel.”
–Georgia Straight

“A novel as sensual and fantastic as a fairy tale and as thoughtful and as beautifully written as anything we might expect from
Michael Ondaatje and Isabel Allende.”
–London Free Press

“Audacious. . . . Salamander is about making books; it’s about why we read and what happens to the chain of our lives when we do.…”
–Quill and Quire (starred review)

“Witty, elliptical and provoking.…Delightful.”
–Montreal Gazette

“A cabinet of wonders.…”
–Globe and Mail

“A vigorous, imaginative novel about the power of reading and invention.”
–Quill and Quire

“Salamander is the sort of book every reader hopes to find, earnestly passes along to friends, and returns to in their dreams.…A visceral, compelling novel that will reward both serious inquiry and reading for pure pleasure.…A beautiful, emotionally resonant postmodern novel.”
–National Post

“This novel cannot help but connect deeply with its readers. . . .”
-Edmonton Journal

“It’s all too rare that you pick up a book and find yourself inexorably swept into a different world, thoroughly absorbed in a realm far removed from the here and now.…Salamander captivates its readers, holds them spellbound, and persists in memory long after you’ve turned the final page.…Thoroughly absorbing.…”
–Vancouver Sun

“Wharton’s novel is both spellbinding and encyclopedic.…It is a book lovers’ book and a lovers’ story.”
–New Brunswick Reader

“Salamander is an extraordinary book of possibilities.”
–Calgary Herald

“[Wharton] cement[s] his reputation as one of Canada’s most promising young writers.”
–Maclean’s