The Famished Lover

In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Alan Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. It is those memories that literally save his life and keep him from a cold grave in a foreign land. Upon his return home to Montreal, Crome seeks the nourishment of body and soul, sometimes impulsively, after years of torture and deprivation. He meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. To her they are obscenities and provoke the bitter taste of jealousy.

The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn’s most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man’s hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing.

AUTHOR

Alan Cumyn

Alan Cumyn is a master of strong fluid prose, startling humour in life’s darkest moments, and characters compellingly human in their strengths and flaws. He is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including Burridge Unbound, finalist for the Giller Prize, and The Sojourn, the novel in which Ramsay Crome first appears.

Reviews

In The Famished Lover, critically acclaimed author Alan Cumyn has created Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite comes home from the First World War. Burning with an intense appetite for beauty, for human contact, for life and love, Ramsay stumbles into a troubled marriage just as the gears of history are aligning for depression and more war. In a moment of optimism Ramsay marries Lillian, a beautiful farm girl from the Eastern Townships south of Montreal. But too soon he is faced with the daunting task of trying to support a family as a commercial artist in the midst of economic chaos. The lingering ghosts of his captivity in a German prisoner-of-war camp haunt him as does his idealized memory of Margaret, the woman left behind when Ramsay originally went into battle, but whose imprint on his psyche will never be erased. Ramsay and Lillian exist, for a while, in a state of frozen matrimony, dogged by his history and her inexperience. He obtains a job as a pin-up artist when most of his contemporaries are walking the streets. Yet, even when he is winning, Ramsay is also captive.

When a passionate affair nearly unhinges him, the fragile truce of his love life seems ready to explode just as Europe is on the verge of sliding into war once again.

“Powerfully understated.”
– Globe and Mail

“The Famished Lover is a compact, well-written and highly entertaining novel.”
– Literary Review of Canada

“Cumyn is an accomplished writer and The Famished Lover is both a complex and compelling read and also that rare thing — a sequel that is the equal of an excellent, moving original and in some way surpasses it.”
– Chronicle Herald

“An insidiously good writer, one who seems to pull finely pitched sentences from clear air.”
“Alan Cumyn’s talent for fiction is absolutely original.”