Like Colm Tóibín's The Master or Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a novel about art and writing in the life of one of the greatsSet in a sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Steven Price's Lampedusa explores the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi, the last prince of Lampedusa, as he struggles to complete his only novel, The Leopard.In 1955, Tomasi was diagnosed with advanced emphysema; shortly after, he began work on a novel that would fail to be published before his death four years later. When The Leopard at last appeared, it won Italy's Strega Prize and became the greatest Italian novel of the century.Adhering intensely to the facts of Tomasi's life but moving deep into the mind of the author, Lampedusainhabits the complicated interior of a man facing down the end of his life and struggling to make something of lasting worth while there is...

London, 1885.William Pinkerton's father, legendary founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, has died. He had managed to catch every criminal that crossed his path, except one: the mysterious thief Edward Shade.In the winter following his father's death, William travels to London to investigate a new lead. But when that lead is found dismembered in the River Thames, he is drawn into the dark orbit of a mysterious man called Adam Foole, who claims to know the truth... if only William can discover what that truth is.Set during the early infancy of crime detection, when photography and fingerprinting were only just beginning to be employed, and travelling from the gold mines of South Africa to the battlefields of the American Civil War, By Gaslight is the remarkable story of two shadowy men, William and Adam – who they are, what they have done and what they are hiding, both from each other and from themselves.

Steven Price's second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals "grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do. " The pleasures of Price's musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of...

Acclaimed Canadian poet Steven Price has conjured a stunning debut novel that marks the arrival of an exceptionally talented young writer. Set in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Into That Darkness opens at the moment when a massive earthquake hits the entire west coast with devastating results. With the city destroyed, survivors are left to negotiate a veritable hell on earth in which bonds of civility are pushed to their limits and often broken. Arthur Lear emerges from the rubble only to descend into another disaster zone as he desperately tries to save a mother and her son trapped beneath broken concrete. After an agonizing rescue operation, they emerge only to begin a harrowing searching for the mother's lost daughter. As they wander through scenes redolent of Dante's Inferno and Hieronymus Bosch, their very sense of humanness is tested and compromised, and they are changed forever by their traumatic experiences and their long journey home. Here is a novel for our age of anxiety and end times, a novel that reflects back to us our deepest fears and strongest hopes in the face of impossible odds. Steven Price delivers a powerful story about the physical manifestation of the darker things lurking in our culture, and in ourselves.