The Leithen Stories: The Power-House: John Macnab: The Dancing Floor: Sick Heart River

by John Buchan, Christopher Harvie (Introduction)

Overview

Edward Leithen is the closest of Buchan's protagonists to the author's own experience and imagination. A prosperous Scots lawyer and
MP in London, Leithen seeks adventure to relieve the tedium of respectability.

In The Power House he is forced by event and accident to see civilisation as a thin veneer over the human jungle; in John Macnab he makes his own adventure by playing the poacher; in Sick Heart River, seeking a lost friend he meets death and redemption in the wastes of Canada.

Each book contrasts with the others; each pulls us into Buchan's world and holds us there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780862419950
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	05/25/2000
Series:	Canongate Classics Series , #23
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	4.96(w) x 7.72(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

John Buchan's adventure stories, The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, have long held a place as classics of their kind. Only now is his historical fiction, which he himself regarded as his finest work, receiving its full due.

Editorial Reviews

"John Buchan was the first to realize the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men."  —Graham Greene

From the Publisher

John Buchan was the first to realise the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar suroundings happening to unadventurous men.

Graham Greene

Buchan knew that you can't buck the consequences of your actions, and that your life is what you make of it. Perhaps his peculiarly Scottish combination of Romanticism and Calvinism - daring living and high thinking - is due to return to fashion.

The Independent Magazine

He explores different themes ... He expounds theories through a wide variety of subjects but all the while there is the basic ingredient of telling a good story so the reader can enjoy their sheer entertainment value.

Yorkshire Gazette and Herald