David Watmough

A father and son sail to Canada on the open Pacific, encountering an array of odd individuals along the way. From seafarers to landlubbers, blue collar to middle class – young and old, gay and straight, Asian and Caucasian – all are observed in this saga stretching from San Francisco to Vancouver, from academe to the downtown streets. To Each an Albatross reveals David Watmough to be a master craftsman at the pinnacle of his form. Reminiscent of Lowry’s Ultramarine or the best of Conrad, the novel is set in the mid-Twentieth Century, though the themes are universal and vitally immediate as the present moment. Stirring, evocative, and rendered in deepest poetry, To Each an Albatross is permeated with the fragile beauty of a coastal world it both celebrates and mourns, a delicate novel of love, longing, compassion and subtle desire.

A naturalized Canadian, David Watmough has been shaped and nourished by a Cornish background as well by years in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco. All his novels, short stories, plays and poems, however, have been written on Canada’s west coast during the past 45 years. Geraldine, his thirteenth fiction title, was published in 2007 by Ekstasis Editions.