The Paper-Boy

About the Book

The Paper-Boy is about a man's obsession with people from the past and how this undermines his judgement and brings confusion to his life.

Marty Fox and his wife Nancy set off from Winnipeg for a holiday around Lake of the Woods to recharge their flagging marriage. The first night works for Marty because of a bottle of Scotch, a radio, and because he can imagine that Nancy is a stranger. The following evening he thinks he recognizes two attractive women, twins, with a much older man. The women are Constance and Rosemary, who moved into Erwin Sommerfeld's house on Marty's Winnipeg paper route in the sixties - Constance as Sommerfeld's 16-year-old wife and Rosemary as a kind of bonus. As a paper-boy, Marty had fantasized over these good-looking girls. Now it all comes back. But does Sommerfeld have a "married" relationship with both sisters?

Rain and high water follow Marty and Nancy who go with Sommerfeld and the twins to a river resort. What really happens to Sommerfeld there? The holiday becomes a nightmare, with strange consequences back in the city not only for Marty, but also for Nancy and Constance and Rosemary.

About the Author

Duncan McWhirter was born in Winnipeg and grew up there and in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Graduating from the University of Toronto, he worked as a reporter on several western Canadian daily newspapers and as an editor and reporter for The Canadian Press news agency in Toronto and Montreal and as an editor and correspondent with the Overseas Press Section of the Central Office of Information and Reuters news agency in London. He has had short stories and cartoons published. His first novel, White Houses, was published in 2000. He lives with his wife Jody in Vancouver.