Solomon Gursky Was Here

Mordecai Richler. Penguin Books, $9.95 (432pp) ISBN 978-0-14-015298-2

A brilliant but alcoholic biographer obsesses over Solomon Gursky, the outrageously daring bootlegger grandson of legendary lecher and arctic explorer Ephraim Gursky. PW said that the author's fifth novel brims ``with sardonic humor, antic imagination and bravura storytelling skill. . . . A perfect, irreverent take on all levels of Canadian society.'' (July)

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