The Invention of the World
Novel (1977)
Jack Hodgins

Then, Donal Keneally, an Irish giant who thought he could invent the world, led a band of faithful followers from rural Ireland to Vancouver Island in search of Eden. In the course of his search he founded the Revelations Colony of Truth.

Now, Maggie Kyle runs an extraordinary boarding house on the original site of the Colony, and she and her irrepressible boarders search out Keneally's story as a key to their own roots and even the possibility of love.

(from the cover of the New Canadian Library edition)

Winner of the Gibson's First Novel Award.

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Reviews

"Masterful stuff - untimid, complex, richly textured…a major and memorable achievement."

Vancouver Sun

"This is an extraordinarily entrancing book; it mingles history, personal experience, and sheer verbal invention in a way that keeps the reader involved page after page. The narrative is presented in a complex yet powerful way; Hodgins has the storyteller's instinct par excellence. With due regard for the difference in region, he writes like Faulkner."

MacDonald Harris (author of The Balloonist).

"Jack Hodgins's The Invention of the World joins Robertson Davies's Fifth Business as the decade's most distinguished achievements in Canadian fiction. What a robust, lyric voice his is, and how stoutly is it addressed to the naysayers inviting us to abandon the theatre of the novel. Here's to Jack Hodgins and to the hale spirit that animates him!" Gordon Lish

(former fiction editor at Esquire, author of Dear Mr Capote: A Novel).