The time is the seventies. The place is Ottawa, a developing city ready for the taking. Two men from very different backgrounds take up the challenge: Jerry McGuinty, plasterer turned builder, a simple, self-made man who claims he can plaster a wall that will change your life; and Simon Struthers, a disaffected businessman whose inherited wealth and position cannot fill the hollowness he feels inside. With their different careers and successes, these two strangers seek to carve out their own happiness—Jerry with his new wife and Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues. As the men's careers and successes run parallel, we see how love is suffocated by work and how individuals are crushed by greed and "progress." With skill, energy, humour and poetry, Colin McAdam creates a world of ambition and desire, power and corruption. Some Great Thing is one of the most thrillingly original novels in years. | Some Great Thing by Colin Mcadam, Paperback | Indigo Chapters