Robertson Davies · 1970 · exile

Robertson Davies's 1970 novel, written as a long letter of complaint from a retiring schoolmaster to his headmaster. A snowball with a stone in it is thrown in a Canadian village in 1908, misses the boy it was meant for, and hits a pregnant woman - and Dunstan Ramsay spends sixty years and three continents working out what he owes her.

1. 1
   Deptford

   A village in southern Ontario, and a snowball on 27 December 1908. Mary Dempster is hit, her son is born premature, and she is never quite right again - and Dunstan, who dodged, decides it is his fault and never stops deciding it.

2. 2
   Passchendaele

   He enlists to get away, takes a machine-gun nest more or less by accident and loses a leg - and lies in the mud beside a statue of the Virgin with Mary Dempster's face, and wakes in Toronto six months later a decorated hero.

3. 3
   Toronto

   Forty-five years teaching history at Colborne College, unmarried and unremarkable, while his boyhood friend Boy Staunton becomes rich and important - and Dunstan quietly becomes a serious hagiographer on the side.

4. 4
   Mexico City

   Following the saints and then following Magnus Eisengrim, the illusionist who turns out to be the Dempster boy - where the schoolmaster's private obsession and the village's oldest injury become the same thing.

5. 5
   Sorgenfrei

   In Switzerland he meets Liesl, who tells him he is fifth business - not hero or heroine or villain, but the character without whom the plot cannot be resolved - which is the sentence the whole book exists for.

6. 6
   Toronto

   Boy Staunton is found in the harbour in his car with a stone in his mouth - the stone from the snowball, which Dunstan had kept for sixty years, and which is where the letter to the headmaster ends.