• Winnipeg Public Library, Canada
  
  

This post-colonial comedy is the story of what happens when Caribbean writer Marcus Royston, a worldly, Oxford-educated, jaded writer from the island of Saint Andrew's finds himself sent to Canada on a cultural exchange, and lodged in the sprawling art nouveau mansion of middle-aged socialite Muriella Pent.

Royston's motivations are self-preserving, hers are self-advancing, and both find themselves pawns of the politically motivated arts committee behind the exchange program. When two young university students -- a boy and a girl who hate each other -- are drawn into Royston's fractious orbit, a decidedly unpleasant sexual competition occurs, and life in the leafy enclave of Stilwoode Park becomes more artistic than any of the exchange's sponsors had ever hoped.

By turns funny, melancholy, and erotically charged, Muriella Pent is told through a collage of dialogue, letters, newspaper articles, and diary entries. It is an unnerving satire about age and youth, desire and privilege, and about warring definitions of art among people from different parts of the former British Empire.

Russell Smith was born in South Africa and raised in Halifax, Canada. His first novel, How Insensitive, was published in 1994 and nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, and became a bestseller in Canada. He is also the author of the novel Noise, the award winning story collection Young Men, and an illustrated adult fable, The Princess and the Whiskheads. A weekly columnist with The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith's articles on a variety of subjects have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Details, Travel and Leisure, Toronto Life, EnRoute, Toro and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto.